Social Media Commons^™

Politics, Sharing And Emotion In Microblogs, Tuan-Anh Hoang, William Cohen, Ee Peng Lim, Doug Pierce, David Redlawsk

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In political contexts, it is known that people act as "motivated reasoners", i.e., information is evaluated first for emotional affect, and this emotional reaction influences later deliberative reasoning steps. As social media becomes a more and more prevalent way of receiving political information, it becomes important to understand more completely the interaction between information, emotion, social community, and information-sharing behavior. In this paper, we describe a high-precision classifier for politically-oriented tweets, and an accurate classifier of a Twitter user's political affiliation. Coupled with existing sentiment-analysis tools for microblogs, these methods enable us to systematically study the interaction of emotion and …

Visual And Linguistic Influences On Public Perceptions Of Swine Confinement, Arthur Leal

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This study was designed to analyze the visual and linguistic characteristics of online (YouTube) videos and electronic newspapers, identifying relationships with positive, negative, and neutral attitudes toward swine confinement.

This study followed a content analysis design. Two coders, trained to an acceptable level of agreement (κ = .68), examined online videos and electronic newspapers, assessing linguistic and visual images used in relation to attitudes toward swine confinement. A series of search terms deemed suitable for this study's objectives were employed in multiple search engines, and 48 articles and 157 videos were coded for content.

Results from this study showed that …

The User’S Communication Patterns On A Mobile Social Network Site, Youngsoo Kim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Given that users are simultaneously connected in multiple communication channels in a social networking service site (e.g., chat, message, and group message), we explore user's collective networking behavior. We collected the data from a mobile social networking site with 4.8 million registered users. The empirical estimation shows interesting results: (1) there are cross-effects across the communication channels: substitute effects for "chat and message" and complementary effects for "message and group message" and "chat and group message" (2) there is significant local network effect but global network effect is not observed, (3) users utilize communication channels for different purposes according to …

Mining Direct Antagonistic Communities In Signed Social Networks, David Lo, Didi Surian, Philips Kokoh Prasetyo, Zhang Kuan, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social networks provide a wealth of data to study relationship dynamics among people. Most social networks such as Epinions and Facebook allow users to declare trusts or friendships with other users. Some of them also allow users to declare distrusts or negative relationships. When both positive and negative links co-exist in a network, some interesting community structures can be studied. In this work, we mine Direct Antagonistic Communities (DACs) within such signed networks. Each DAC consists of two sub-communities with positive relationships among members of each sub-community, and negative relationships among members of the other sub-community. Identifying direct antagonistic communities …

The Residual Resistance Of The Individual Within The Rhizomatic Hegemony Of The Internet, Emma Katherine Wolfe

English Theses & Dissertations

Networked cyborgs that exist within the non-hierarchical rhizomatic network of the Internet risk losing the concept of their individuality as our identity becomes less important than the group. However, if the rhizomatic network is thought of as a hegemony that exists on the Internet, we can resist this through the residual notion of individual identity. Since cyborgs must perform in order to exist on the rhizomatic network, they can become aware of and perform their individuality through awareness of the computer medium. There are three methods for networked cyborgs to assert their individuality discussed in this thesis.

The first is …

Reviving Dormant Ties In An Online Social Network Experiment, Ee Peng Lim, Denzil Correa, David Lo, Michael Finegold, Feida Zhu

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Social network users connect and interact with one another to fulfil different kinds of social and information needs. When interaction ceases between two users, we say that their tie becomes dormant. While there are different underlying reasons of dormant ties, it is important to find means to revive such ties so as to maintain vibrancy in the relationships. In this work, we thus focus on designing an online experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of personalized social messages to revive dormant ties. The experiment carefully selects users with dormant ties so that no user gets mixed treatments and be affected by …

Online Social Media And Informal Language Learning, Nikita Chan

Practical Social and Industrial Research Symposium

No abstract provided.

Engaging And Expanding Communities: Widening The Circle Of Stakeholders, Lisa Deangelis, Maureen A. Scully, Andrea Wight

Emerging Leaders Program Team Projects

The 32 fellows in the 2013 Emerging Leaders Program (ELP) worked with community partners to investigate the theme, “Engaging and Expanding Communities".

They worked with six community partners, and identified ways to help them expand beyond their core stakeholders to a wider circle of stakeholders and broader potential impact. The fellows gave their time and professional skills to understand how to reach new business partners, new participants, new advisors, and new donors. They conducted surveys, interviews, and focus groups; explored social media options; examined best practices; and considered ways to tell powerful stories about the vitally important work of the …

Anomaly Detection On Social Data, Hanbo Dai

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

The advent of online social media including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Youtube has drawn massive attention in recent years. These online platforms generate massive data capturing the behavior of multiple types of human actors as they interact with one another and with resources such as pictures, books and videos. Unfortunately, the openness of these platforms often leaves them highly susceptible to abuse by suspicious entities such as spammers. It therefore becomes increasingly important to automatically identify these suspicious entities and eliminate their threats. We call these suspicious entities anomalies in social data, as they often hold different agenda comparing to …

A Latent Variable Model For Viewpoint Discovery From Threaded Forum Posts, Minghui Qiu, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Threaded discussion forums provide an important social media platform. Its rich user generated content has served as an important source of public feedback. To automatically discover the viewpoints or stances on hot issues from forum threads is an important and useful task. In this paper, we propose a novel latent variable model for viewpoint discovery from threaded forum posts. Our model is a principled generative latent variable model which captures three important factors: viewpoint specific topic preference, user identity and user interactions. Evaluation results show that our model clearly outperforms a number of baseline models in terms of both clustering …

From Scrapbook To Facebook: A History Of Personal Media Assemblage And Archives, Katie Day Good

University Faculty Publications and Creative Works

This study surveys recent research on print-era scrapbooks and contemporary social media to highlight commonalities between the two formats, both in terms of the practices they have historically promoted for users, and the methodological challenges they produce for researchers. It argues that scrapbooks and social media can be conceptualized as sites of personal media assemblage and personal media archives, a designation that highlights the simultaneously social and archival dimensions of each form. After discussing these formal similarities, the author identifies three shared functions: (1) documenting friendship, (2) navigating new media abundance, and (3) communicating taste and building cultural capital. By …

Real Time Event Detection In Twitter, Xun Wang, Feida Zhu, Jing Jiang, Sujian Li

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Event detection has been an important task for a long time. When it comes to Twitter, new problems are presented. Twitter data is a huge temporal data flow with much noise and various kinds of topics. Traditional sophisticated methods with a high computational complexity aren’t designed to handle such data flow efficiently. In this paper, we propose a mixture Gaussian model for bursty word extraction in Twitter and then employ a novel time-dependent HDP model for new topic detection. Our model can grasp new events, the location and the time an event becomes bursty promptly and accurately. Experiments show the …

The Impact Of Social Media Use On Athlete/Fan Communication During The Olympics, Maggie Pearce

Undergraduate Theses and Capstone Projects

The 2012 London Olympic Games were known as the “Social Media Olympics.” For the first time, the International Olympic Committee encouraged athletes to use social media sites. Athletes, fans, countries and news outlets all used social media to share information and opinions about the Olympics. This thesis examines whether or not athletes communicated effectively on social media sites.

Social Media And Medical Students: What Are They Thinking?, Alexandra Gomes, Gisela Butera, Terry Kind, Katherine C. Chretien

Himmelfarb Library Faculty Posters and Presentations

This poster provides a review of interim results from a qualitative study on first year medical students' attitudes and perceptions of their definition of medical professionalism in social media. Included in the study is an evaluation of changes in perspective since becoming a medical student and after participating in an E-Professionalism and Social Media instructional session.

Activism, Deliberation, And Networked Public Screens: Rhetorical Scenes From The Occupy Moment In Lincoln, Nebraska (Part 1 & 2), Joshua P. Ewalt, Jessy J. Ohl, Damien S. Pfister

Department of Communication Studies: Faculty Publications

Part 1 of this manuscript is a dramatization of five rhetorical scenes that take the Occupy phenomenon as a moment to explore features of contemporary social protest and change. Drawing on rhetorical field notes collected over the first two weeks of Occupy Lincoln in Nebraska, we identify how historical tensions between activism and deliberation were both complicated and reasserted as the Occupy moment became a movement. The rhetorical scenes partially replicate actual conversations, though they are remediated through three composite figures: Anda, a longtime social activist; John, an advocate of democratic deliberation; and Dajuan, an undergraduate organizer of the local …

The Genre Of The Meme, Thomas Monson

Colloquy Undergraduate Research Journal

The development and proliferation of the Internet has led to numerous discoveries in the study of media and communication. Such a recent development in online communication is the rise of the online meme. The traditional meaning of meme has been transformed and has developed a new meaning within the sphere of online communication. The meme as defined by its new meaning has recurred in myriads, which have provided enough reason and data to develop a rhetorical genre for the subject. The first half of this study—the background—will begin with an orientation to the meme, an explanation of generic criticism, and …

How Sports Franchises Communicate Via Social Media, Christopher Jones

HIM 1990-2015

The aim of the research is to evaluate how professional sport organizations communicate via social media and lay groundwork on how to effectively do so in the future. The research focuses on the history of social media and its involvement in sport, how it's used today, examples of effective communication and how it can eventually drive revenue for a sport franchise and build a stronger fan base at the same time.

Content Analysis: U.S. Newspaper And Social Media Portrayal Of President Obama In Association With The Killing Of Osama Bin Laden During The 2012 Presidential Election Year, Whitney Y. Thomas

Undergraduate Honors Theses

In a broad sense, public relations is the communication between an organization and its audience. Public relations helps create and maintain a relationship between the two. When an organization experiences a success or failure public relations is put into place to help rally public support.

The intent of this thesis aims to determine the tone of President Obama in U.S. newspapers and social media in association with the capturing and killing of terrorist Osama bin Laden.

This thesis examines a variety of U.S. newspapers by region and social media. Newspaper articles related to the topic were retrieved from six regional …

Fragmented Social Media: A Look Into Selective Exposure To Political News, Jisun An, Daniele Quercia, Jon Crowcroft

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The hypothesis of selective exposure assumes that people crave like-minded information and eschew information that conflicts with their beliefs, and that has negative consequences on political life. Yet, despite decades of research, this hypothesis remains theoretically promising but empirically difficult to test. We look into news articles shared on Facebook and examine whether selective exposure exists or not in social media. We find a concrete evidence for a tendency that users predominantly share like-minded news articles and avoid conflicting ones, and partisans are more likely to do that. Building tools to counter partisanship on social media would require the ability …

"Why Can't We Be Friends?:" Does The Quality Of Romantic Relationships Influence Facebook Friendships With Former Romantic Partners, Dylan Medeiros

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This research attempted to identify relational characteristics of unmarried, romantic partners that ultimately distinguish between former partners who remained Facebook friends versus those who did not. Survey results (N=323) revealed no significant differences between former partners who remained Facebook friends versus those who did not remain Facebook friends based on quantity of relational investments, preference for de-escalatory disengagement strategy, and relational satisfaction.

Personalized News Recommender Using Twitter, Satya Srinivasa Nirmal Jonnalagedda

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Online news reading has become a widely popular way to read news articles from news sources around the globe. With the enormous amount of news articles available, users are easily swamped by information of little interest to them. News recommender systems are one approach to help users find interesting articles to read. News recommender systems present the articles to individual users based on their interests rather than presenting articles in order of their occurrence. In this thesis, we present our research on developing personalized news recommendation system with the help of a popular micro-blogging service "Twitter". The news articles are …

Impact Of Multimedia In Sina Weibo: Popularity And Life Span, Xun Zhao, Feida Zhu, Weining Qian, Aoying Zhou

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Multimedia contents such as images and videos are widely used in social network sites nowadays. Sina Weibo, a Chinese microblogging service, is one of the first microblog platforms to incorporate multimedia content sharing features. This work provides statistical analysis on how multimedia contents are produced, consumed, and propagated in Sina Weibo. Based on 230 million tweets and 1.8 million user profiles in Sina Weibo, we study the impact of multimedia contents on the popularity of both users and tweets as well as tweet life span. Our preliminary study shows that multimedia tweets dominant pure text ones in Sina Weibo. Multimedia …

Your Love Is Public Now: Questioning The Use Of Personal Information In Authentication, Payas Gupta, Swapna Gottipati, Jing Jiang, Debin Gao

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Most social networking platforms protect user's private information by limiting access to it to a small group of members, typically friends of the user, while allowing (virtually) everyone's access to the user's public data. In this paper, we exploit public data available on Facebook to infer users' undisclosed interests on their profile pages. In particular, we infer their undisclosed interests from the public data fetched using Graph APIs provided by Facebook. We demonstrate that simply liking a Facebook page does not corroborate that the user is interested in the page. Instead, we perform sentiment-oriented mining on various attributes of a …

Retweeting: An Act Of Viral Users, Susceptible Users, Or Viral Topics?, Tuan-Anh Hoang, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

When a user retweets, there are three behavioral factors that cause the actions. They are the topic virality, user virality and user susceptibility. Topic virality captures the degree to which a topic attracts retweets by users. For each topic, user virality and susceptibility refer to the likelihood that a user attracts retweets and performs retweeting respectively. To model a set of observed retweet data as a result of these three topic specific factors, we first represent the retweets as a three-dimensional tensor of the tweet authors, their followers, and the tweets themselves. We then propose the V 2S model, a …

Unified Entity Search In Social Media Community, Ting Yao, Yuan Liu, Chong-Wah Ngo, Tao Mei

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The search for entities is the most common search behavior on the Web, especially in social media communities where entities (such as images, videos, people, locations, and tags) are highly heterogeneous and correlated. While previous research usually deals with these social media entities separately, we are investigating in this paper a unified, multilevel, and correlative entity graph to represent the unstructured social media data, through which various applications (e.g., friend suggestion, personalized image search, image tagging, etc.) can be realized more effectively in one single framework. We regard the social media objects equally as “entities” and all of these applications …

Consumption And Dependency Of Social Network Sites As A News Medium: A Comparison Between College Students And General Population, Louisa Ha, Kisung Yoon, Xiaoqun Zhang

School of Media and Communication Faculty Publications

This exploratory study investigates social network sites (SNS) users’ time allocation behavior among various traditional and new media. Specifically, it examines the difference in degree of dependency on SNS between the young generation and the general population as a new form of news medium based on the media system dependency (MSD) and the microeconomic consumption (MEC) theories. The research results reveal that SNS, along with other online media, such as online audio/video news, are the preferred news sources for young people and they are more likely to be interested in soft news than hard news. SNS has become online users’ …

Unauthorized Televised Debate Footage In Political Campaign Advertising: Fair Use And The Dmca, Susan Park

Management Faculty Publications and Presentations

No abstract provided.

Social Media Marketing: How Social Media Has Impacted The Gender Differences That Exist Amongst Sports Fans, And Its Effect Of Marketers, Timothy French

Professional Projects

This professional research study accessed the current relationship between season ticket holders of Marquette University men’s college basketball team and usage of social media. A survey was created based on a modification of the Sport Spectator Identification Scale (or SSIS) as well as the Sport Fandom Questionnaire (or SFQ), and included specific questions related to the individual’s demographics, social media usage, and experience attending collegiate basketball games. Despite the fact that females are continuing to have an increasing presence in the vast world of sports, marketers and organizations continue to place a strong focus on the needs, interests, and desires …

Social Media And The Transformation Of The Humanitarian Narrative: A Comparative Analysis Of Humanitarian Discourse In Libya 2011 And Bosnia 1994, Ellen Noble

Political Science Honors Projects

Within humanitarian discourse, there is a prevailing narrative: the powerful liberal heroes are saving the helpless, weak victims. However, the beginning of the 21^st century marks the expansion of the digital revolution throughout lesser-developed states. Growing access to the Internet has enabled aid recipients to communicate with the outside world, giving them an unprecedented opportunity to reshape discourses surrounding humanitarianism. Through a comparative discourse analysis of Libyan Tweets, 1994 newspaper reports on Bosnia, and 2011 newspaper reports on Libya, this paper analyzes whether aid recipient discourse can resist the dominant humanitarian narrative and if that resistance can influence dominant …

Finding The Optimal Social Trust Path For The Selection Of Trustworthy Service Providers In Complex Social Networks, Guanfeng Liu, Yan Wang, Mehmet A. Orgun, Ee Peng Lim

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Online social networks have provided the infrastructure for a number of emerging applications in recent years, e.g., for the recommendation of service providers or the recommendation of files as services. In these applications, trust is one of the most important factors in decision making by a service consumer, requiring the evaluation of the trustworthiness of a service provider along the social trust paths from a service consumer to the service provider. However, there are usually many social trust paths between two participants who are unknown to one another. In addition, some social information, such as social relationships between participants and …