Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Citizens Of The World: An Autoethnography Of Couchsurfing And Uncertainty Reduction Theory, Anderson Santos

Masters Theses

This study examines through an autoethnography the culture of couchsurfing and the process of hospitality networks through computer mediated communication in five European countries during three months of 2012. Using Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a framework the study was divided into five topics and analyzed using Uncertainty reduction theory. The study found that couchsurfers have needs and prioritize these needs as The hierarchy of needs predicts. CouchSurfers also employ uncertainty reduction strategies similar to those used within computer mediated communication when choosing their host. Over 20 hosting experiences have been analyzed in this study. The field data was collected …

Leave Them (Texting) Kidz Alone, Melody Bowdon

UCF Forum

By trade, I am a professor of writing and rhetoric. In layman’s terms, this makes me an English teacher. These are deeply dreaded words for many people. When I identify my profession to new acquaintances, I get a range of responses: obviously, some people don’t find it that interesting—it’s not like I’m an astronaut or plastic surgeon, and everyone has known her or his fair share of English teachers. Others, though, have very strong reactions, letting me know that they hate English or have never been “good at it.”

Living Proof: Autobiographical Political Argument In We Are The 99 Percent And We Are The 53 Percent, Doron Taussig

Media and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

People often cite life experiences as evidence in political arguments, though personal experience is far from generalizable. How do these arguments work? In this paper, I consider the rhetorical dynamics of “autobiographical political argument” by examining We are the 99 Percent and We are the 53 Percent, two blogs that use autobiographical stories to make discursive points. I argue that these autobiographical appeals efficiently use all three of Aristotle’s persuasive “proofs”—logos (logic), ethos (credibility), and pathos (emotion). Then I show that many of the blogs’ stories focus on “redemption,” a theme personality psychologists have found emphasized in the narrative …

Mobile Technologies And The Incidence Of Cyberbullying In Seven European Countries: Findings From Net Children Go Mobile, Brian O'Neill, Thuy Dinh

Articles

The harmful effects of bullying and harassment on children have long been of concern to parents, educators, and policy makers. The online world presents a new environment in which vulnerable children can be victimized and a space where perpetrators find new ways to perform acts of harassment. While online bullying is often considered to be an extension of persistent offline behavior, according to EU Kids Online (2011), the most common form of bullying is in person, face-to-face. With the rise in use of mobile Internet technologies, this balance is changing. Increased levels of use and more time spent online accessed …

Icils 2013: Information About The Australian Data Files, Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

ICT - Digital Literacy

This document details the national variables that are available in the Australian International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) 2013 data files. The data files are located in the ICT – Digital Literacy series.

Icils 2013: Australian Teacher Data [Spss], Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

ICT - Digital Literacy

This dataset (SPSS zipped) is a data source for the report: International Computer and Information Literacy Study 2013: Australian students’ readiness for study, work and life in the digital age.

The International Computer and Information Literacy study (ICILS) methodology is complex. Prior to undertaking any analyses, it is recommended data users become familiar with all the information (for example, plausible values and replicate weights) required to understand and analyse the data files.

Information about the Australian ICILS 2013 data files is available here.

The ICILS 2013 User Guide, to accompany ICILS data, is available for download here.

The …

Icils 2013: Australian Teacher Data [Sas], Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

ICT - Digital Literacy

This dataset (SAS zipped) is a data source for the report: International Computer and Information Literacy Study 2013: Australian students’ readiness for study, work and life in the digital age.

The International Computer and Information Literacy study (ICILS) methodology is complex. Prior to undertaking any analyses, it is recommended data users become familiar with all the information (for example, plausible values and replicate weights) required to understand and analyse the data files.

Information about the Australian ICILS 2013 data files is available here.

The ICILS 2013 User Guide, to accompany ICILS data, is available for download here. …

Icils 2013: Australian School Data [Spss], Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

ICT - Digital Literacy

This dataset (SPSS zipped) is a data source for the report: International Computer and Information Literacy Study 2013: Australian students’ readiness for study, work and life in the digital age.

The International Computer and Information Literacy study (ICILS) methodology is complex. Prior to undertaking any analyses, it is recommended data users become familiar with all the information (for example, plausible values and replicate weights) required to understand and analyse the data files.

Information about the Australian ICILS 2013 data files is available here.

The ICILS 2013 User Guide, to accompany ICILS data, is available for download here. …

Icils 2013: Australian School Data [Sas], Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

ICT - Digital Literacy

This dataset (SAS zipped) is a data source for the report: International Computer and Information Literacy Study 2013: Australian students’ readiness for study, work and life in the digital age.

The International Computer and Information Literacy Study (ICILS) methodology is complex. Prior to undertaking any analyses, it is recommended data users become familiar with all the information (for example, plausible values and replicate weights) required to understand and analyse the data files.

Information about the Australian ICILS 2013 data files is available here.

The ICILS 2013 User Guide, to accompany ICILS data, is available for download here. …

Icils 2013: Australian Student Data [Spss], Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

ICT - Digital Literacy

This dataset (SPSS zipped) is a data source for the report: International Computer and Information Literacy Study 2013: Australian students’ readiness for study, work and life in the digital age.

The International Computer and Information Literacy study (ICILS) methodology is complex. Prior to undertaking any analyses, it is recommended data users become familiar with all the information (for example, plausible values and replicate weights) required to understand and analyse the data files.

Information about the Australian ICILS 2013 data files is available here.

The ICILS 2013 User Guide, to accompany ICILS data, is available for download here. …

Icils 2013: Australian Student Data [Sas], Australian Council For Educational Research (Acer)

ICT - Digital Literacy

This dataset (SAS zipped) is a data source for the report: International Computer and Information Literacy Study 2013: Australian students’ readiness for study, work and life in the digital age.

The International Computer and Information Literacy study (ICILS) methodology is complex. Prior to undertaking any analyses, it is recommended data users become familiar with all the information (for example, plausible values and replicate weights) required to understand and analyse the data files.

Information about the Australian ICILS 2013 data files is available here.

The ICILS 2013 User Guide, to accompany ICILS data, is available for download here. …

Exploring Ways Social Media Data Inform Public Issues Communication: An Analysis Of Twitter Conversation During The 2012-2013 Drought In Nebraska, Adam Wagler, Karen J. Cannon

Department of Agricultural Leadership, Education, and Communication: Faculty Publications

Social networking sites often are used to maintain close social ties, but increasingly they are used for information and news dissemination, specifically about major events and crises. In 2012, a historic drought struck the Midwest, destroying or damaging portions of major field crops in major agricultural production states. By the end of August 2012, 90% of Nebraska was declared in extreme or exceptional drought, leading to bans on irrigation, damaged crops, and record-low yields as well as damaging the state’s leading economic sector. This case study used social media monitoring and analysis to explore online Twitter conversations related to this …

Gender-Based Violence In 140 Characters Or Fewer: A #Bigdata Case Study Of Twitter, Hemant Purohit, Tanvi Banerjee, Andrew Hampton, Valerie L. Shalin, Nayanesh Bhandutia, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Public institutions are increasingly reliant on data from social media sites to measure public attitude and provide timely public engagement. Such reliance includes the exploration of public views on important social issues such as gender-based violence (GBV). In this study, we examine big (social) data consisting of nearly fourteen million tweets collected from Twitter over a period of ten months to analyze public opinion regarding GBV, highlighting the nature of tweeting practices by geographical location and gender. We demonstrate the utility of Computational Social Science to mine insight from the corpus while accounting for the influence of both transient events …

#Advocatingforchange: The Strategic Use Of Hashtags In Social Media Advocacy, Gregory D. Saxton, Jerome N. Niyirora, Chao Guo, Richard D. Waters

Public and Nonprofit Administration

Social media continues to change how advocacy organizations mobilize, educate, and connect with their constituents. One of the most unique yet understudied tools available on social media platforms is the hashtag. Little research exists on how social work and advocacy organizations use hashtags, much less on how such use can be effective. This study examines the hashtag use by 105 constituent members of the National Health Council, a national US-based patient/health advocacy coalition. The study presents an inductive coding scheme of the types of hashtags employed, analyzes inter-sectoral differences in hashtag usage, and examines the relationship between hashtag use and …

Knowledge Enabled Approach To Predict The Location Of Twitter Users, Revathy Krishnamurthy, Pavan Kapanipathi, Amit P. Sheth, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

Knowledge bases have been used to improve performance in applications ranging from web search and event detection to entity recognition and disambiguation. More recently, knowledge bases have been used to analyze social data. A key challenge in social data analysis has been the identification of the geographic location of online users in a social network such as Twitter. Existing approaches to predict the location of users, based on their tweets, rely solely on social media features or probabilistic language models. These approaches are supervised and require large training dataset of geo-tagged tweets to build their models. As most Twitter users …

Mining Behavior Of Citizen Sensor Communities To Improve Cooperation With Organizational Actors, Hemant Purohit

Kno.e.sis Publications

Web 2.0 (social media) provides a natural platform for dynamic emergence of citizen (as) sensor communities, where the citizens generate content for sharing information and engaging in discussions. Such a citizen sensor community (CSC) has stated or implied goals that are helpful in the work of formal organizations, such as an emergency management unit, for prioritizing their response needs. This research addresses questions related to design of a cooperative system of organizations and citizens in CSC. Prior research by social scientists in a limited offline and online environment has provided a foundation for research on cooperative behavior challenges, including ‘ …

Value Oriented Big Data Processing With Applications, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan

Kno.e.sis Publications

We discuss the nature of Big Data and address the role of semantics in analyzing and processing Big Data that arises in the context of Physical-Cyber-Social Systems. To handle Volume, we advocate semantic perception that can convert low-level observational data to higher-level abstractions more suitable for decision- making. To handle Variety, we resort to semantic models and annotations of data so that intelligent processing can be done independent of heterogeneity of data formats and media. To handle Velocity, we seek to use continuous semantics capability to dynamically create event or situation specific models and recognize relevant new concepts, entities and …

The Paradox Of Public Diplomacy On The Web: An Empirical Analysis On Interactivity And Narratives Of Nation-States' Ministry Of Foreign Affairs Web Sites, Hyung Min Lee, Kevin Y. Wang, Yejin Hong

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

Against the backdrop of Habermas’ theory of communicative action, we empirically analyzed the level of interactivity and narratives offered in nation-states’ ministry of foreign affairs Web sites. A multiple regression analysis was performed in an attempt to identify factors affecting the level of interactivity in such Web sites. Findings revealed that the level of economic development is the sole significant factor in regards to the level of interactivity. Further, self-interested, goal-directed, and strategic purposes behind the allegedly transparent, engaging, and interactive public diplomacy were evidenced through a critical analysis of the objectives, key issues, and target publics addressed and highlighted …

Video Games As Meaningful Entertainment Experiences, Mary Beth Oliver, Nicholas David Bowman, Julia K. Woolley, Ryan Rogers, Brett I. Sherrick, Mun-Youn Chung

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

We conducted an experiment to examine individuals’ perceptions of enjoyable and meaningful video games and the game characteristics and dimensions of need satisfaction associated with enjoyment and appreciation. Participants (N = 512) were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups that asked them to recall a game that they found either particularly fun or particularly meaningful, and to then rate their perceptions of the game that they recalled. Enjoyment was high for both groups, though appreciation was higher in the meaningful- than fun-game condition. Further, enjoyment was most strongly associated with gameplay characteristics and satisfaction of needs related to competency …

Tolerance On Facebook: Exploring Network Diversity And Social Distance, Lee Farquhar, Theresa Davidson

Scholarship and Professional Work - Communication

This study examines Facebook usage, network composition, and desired social distance from groups often perceived as the “other”. Specifically, we examine attitudes toward Atheists, Muslims, and Gays. Findings indicate that social network composition (ie - network diversity, number of unique groups, number of Facebook friends) plays a significant role in participants’ desired social distance from said groups. Generally, these findings suggest that increasing diversity in a Facebook network may lead to a decrease in prejudice.