Browsing by Subject "Twitter"
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Item Analyzing content deviance in American community journalism websites and social media(2013-12) Funk, Marcus James; Sylvie, GeorgeThis dissertation explores deviance, operationalized through news factors, among American community weekly, community daily, large daily, and national daily newspaper websites and social media posts. Computerized quantitative analysis indicates that circulation size makes little to no significant difference concerning the publication of deviant news factors; smaller circulation sizes are significantly related to the publication of news concerning local communities, but not egalitarian news factors generally. Qualitative, structured interviews of community newspaper editors and publishers illustrate a different agenda - a clear focus for news on "regular people and routine events," arguably egalitarianism, over news on "unusual people or extraordinary events," arguably deviance. This indicates a need for further evaluation and development of computerized content analysis, gatekeeping theory, and the community newspaper industry. Results also suggest a need to reconsider and re-evaluate normative deviance as a concept and point to two potential theoretical developments: considering a Deviant-Egalitarian Spectrum and drastically broadening the current fringe focus of deviance research.Item Brand personality research on Twitter(2015-05) Chung, Arnold Dongwoo; Wilcox, Gary B.Social media has become a new channel for both brands and social media users. On social media channels, not only does a brand provide messages to their followers, but also social media users consume, contribute, and create brand related messages. In these social media messages, the brand personality that consumers actually do think and feel is included. In previous brand personality research, surveys have been the primary research methodology, however in this study, text mining in social media was utilized to examine brand personality. More specifically, Twitter messages, including the keywords Apple, Samsung, iPhone, and Galaxy, were collected and examined.Item Catweetegories : machine learning to organize your Twitter stream(2013-12) Simoes, Christopher Francis; Aziz, AdnanWe want to create a web service that will help users better organize the flood of tweets they receive every day by using machine learning. This was done by experimenting with ways to manually classify training sets of tweets such as using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and crawling the Internet for large quantities of tweets. Once we acquired good training data, we began building a classifier. We tried NLTK and Stanford NLP as libraries for creating a classifier, and we ultimately created a classifier that is 87.5% accurate. We then built a web service to expose this classifier and to allow any user on the Internet to organize their tweets. We built our web service by using many open source tools, and we discuss how we integrated these tools to create a production quality web service. We run our web service in the Amazon cloud, and we review the costs associated with running in Amazon. Finally we review the lessons we learned and share our thoughts on further work we would like to do in the future.Item Celebrity and fandom on Twitter : examining electronic dance music in the Digital Age(2012-12) Anaipakos, Jessica Lyle; Kumar, Shanti; Staiger, JanetThis thesis looks at electronic dance music (EDM) celebrity and fandom through the eyes of four producers on Twitter. Twitter was initially designed as a conversation platform, loosely based on the idea of instant-messaging but emerged in its current form as a micro-blog social network in 2009. EDM artists count on the website to promote their music, engage with fans, discover new songs, and contact each other. More specifically, Twitter is an extension of a celebrity’s private life, as most celebrities access Twitter from their cellphones and personal computers, cutting out gatekeepers from controlling their image. Four power player producers in EDM are used as case studies for analysis of the intimacy and reach Twitter provides. Chosen because of their visibility, style, and recognition, Deadmau5, Diplo, Skrillex, and Tiësto represent different EDM subgenres, run their own record labels, have dedicated fans, and are accessible through social media. All use Twitter to announce shows, interact with fans, promote contests and merchandise, and share stories and pictures of their personal lives with their fan followers. Tweets are a direct line for fans to communicate with these celebrities through the reply, retweet (RT), and mention functions on Twitter. Fan tweets to and from these EDM celebrities are also examined by looking at celebrity-fan encounters in the cyber world and the real world, aftereffects of celebrity RTs, and engagement with said celebrities. The internet is the lifeline for this subculture as it changed the way EDM is shared, promoted, and packaged. Twitter and other social media sites give producers the exposure they never experienced with traditional media and allow fans to participate in a global subculture. To sum up, this is a study on how Twitter influenced EDM and personalized the relationship between producers and fans.Item Characterizing the relationship in social media between language and perspective on science-based reasoning as justification for belief(2014-05) Evans, James Spencer; Baldridge, JasonBeliefs that are not the result of science-based interpretation of evidence (e.g., belief in ghosts or belief that prayer is effective) are extremely common. Science enthusiasts have expressed interest in automatic detection of non-science-based claims. This thesis intends to provide some first steps toward a solution, specifically aimed at detecting Twitter users who are likely or unlikely to take a science-based perspective on all topics. As part of this thesis, a set a Twitter users was labeled as being either "pro-science" (i.e. as having the view that beliefs are rational if and only if they are in accord with science-based reasoning) or "non-pro-science" (i.e. as having the view that beliefs may be reasonable even if they are not in accord with science-based reasoning). Word frequency ratios relative to a neutral dataset, and a simple topic alignment technique, suggest considerable linguistic divergence between the pro-science and non-pro-science users. High accuracy logistic regression classification using linguistic features of users' recent tweets support that idea. Supervised classification experiments suggest that the pro-science and non-pro-science perspectives are not only detectable from linguistic features, but that they can be abstracted away from particular topics (i.e. that the pro-science and non-pro-science perspectives are not inherently topic-specific). Results from distantly supervised classification suggest that using easily acquired, weakly labeled data may be preferable to the much slower process of individually labeling data for some applications, despite the pronounced inferiority to the fully supervised approach in terms of accuracy. The best classifier obtained in this thesis has an accuracy of 93.9%.Item Combating Threats to the Quality of Information in Social Systems(2013-06-04) Lee, KyuminMany large-scale social systems such as Web-based social networks, online social media sites and Web-scale crowdsourcing systems have been growing rapidly, enabling millions of human participants to generate, share and consume content on a massive scale. This reliance on users can lead to many positive effects, including large-scale growth in the size and content in the community, bottom-up discovery of ?citizen-experts?, serendipitous discovery of new resources beyond the scope of the system designers, and new social-based information search and retrieval algorithms. But the relative openness and reliance on users coupled with the widespread interest and growth of these social systems carries risks and raises growing concerns over the quality of information in these systems. In this dissertation research, we focus on countering threats to the quality of information in self-managing social systems. Concretely, we identify three classes of threats to these systems: (i) content pollution by social spammers, (ii) coordinated campaigns for strategic manipulation, and (iii) threats to collective attention. To combat these threats, we propose three inter-related methods for detecting evidence of these threats, mitigating their impact, and improving the quality of information in social systems. We augment this three-fold defense with an exploration of their origins in ?crowdturfing? ? a sinister counterpart to the enormous positive opportunities of crowdsourcing. In particular, this dissertation research makes four unique contributions: ? The first contribution of this dissertation research is a framework for detecting and filtering social spammers and content polluters in social systems. To detect and filter individual social spammers and content polluters, we propose and evaluate a novel social honeypot-based approach. ? Second, we present a set of methods and algorithms for detecting coordinated campaigns in large-scale social systems. We propose and evaluate a content- driven framework for effectively linking free text posts with common ?talking points? and extracting campaigns from large-scale social systems. ? Third, we present a dual study of the robustness of social systems to collective attention threats through both a data-driven modeling approach and deploy- ment over a real system trace. We evaluate the effectiveness of countermeasures deployed based on the first moments of a bursting phenomenon in a real system. ? Finally, we study the underlying ecosystem of crowdturfing for engaging in each of the three threat types. We present a framework for ?pulling back the curtain? on crowdturfers to reveal their underlying ecosystem on both crowdsourcing sites and social media.Item Data-rich document geotagging using geodesic grids(2011-05) Wing, Benjamin Patai; Baldridge, Jason; Erk, KatrinThis thesis investigates automatic geolocation (i.e. identification of the location, expressed as latitude/longitude coordinates) of documents. Geolocation can be an effective means of summarizing large document collections and is an important component of geographic information retrieval. We describe several simple supervised methods for document geolocation using only the document’s raw text as evidence. All of our methods predict locations in the context of geodesic grids of varying degrees of resolution. We evaluate the methods on geotagged Wikipedia articles and Twitter feeds. For Wikipedia, our best method obtains a median prediction error of just 11.8 kilometers. Twitter geolocation is more challenging: we obtain a median error of 479 km, an improvement on previous results for the dataset.Item Embodied rhetoric : memory and delivery in networked writing(2010-12) Jones, John Mark, 1978-; Syverson, Margaret A., 1948-; Walker, Jeffrey; Davis, Diane; Bremen, Brian A.; Selfe, Cynthia L.Whereas the traditional rhetorical practices of memory and delivery were directly connected to the body of the speaker, I argue that when communication is embodied on digital networks, the processes underlying memory and delivery—the coordination of individual and text and the use of embodied affordances to present a text, respectively— are expressed in different ways. Resonance, or the act of bringing two structures into coordination with each other, and switching, or the act of making connections between two networks, fulfill the role of memory in digital networks, coordinating the actions of different networks. Similarly, the protocol, or the technical and cultural rules of networks, and the program, or the emergent behavior, of a network must be taken into account by writers who wish to achieve rhetorical ends. Using three case studies of network formation on the microblogging service Twitter, I show how the acts of resonance and switching, along with the protocol and program of these networks, influence network formation, the types of communication generated by networks, and how those networks are received by outsiders.Item Essays on the economics of information systems in the mobile era(2012-08) Rui, Huaxia; Whinston, Andrew B.In recent years, mobility empowered by smart phones, tablets and numerous applications running on those mobile devices is transforming the way people live and work in the digital age. Innovations and new business models are emerging that take advantages of this rise of mobile computing. Despite tremendous opportunities promised by the transition to mobility, challenges exist before its full potential can be realized by society as well as by companies. For example, the spread of real-time targeting technologies in mobile display advertising creates a new challenge of how to efficiently allocate countless categories of advertising opportunities, or impressions, in real time. For another example, social broadcasting networks such as Twitter in the U.S. and "Weibo" in China are making it extremely convenient for consumers to spread word-of-mouth (WOM) among them, which both poses new challenges and offers new opportunities to companies wishing to harness the power of consumer WOM. The dissertation contains three essays exploring those issues. In the first essay, the concept of "smart market" for impression allocation is proposed, which emphasizes allocation contingent on uncertain supply and promotes coordination among advertisers across impression categories. A new theory is developed to solve the complicated optimization problem, which leads to a "decomposition and standardization" algorithm. In the second essay, I investigated whether and how Twitter WOM affects movie sales by estimating a dynamic panel data model using publicly available data and well-known machine learning algorithms. I found that chatter on Twitter does matter; however, the magnitude and direction of the effect depends on whom the WOM is from and what the WOM is about. The findings provide new perspectives to understand the effect of WOM on product sales and have important managerial implications. The third essay examines the possibility of designing social-broadcasting-based business intelligence (BI) systems that utilizes real-time information extracted from social broadcasting networks with text mining techniques. A new framework is proposed for this purpose and a Twitter-based BI system is designed and implemented that forecasts movie box office revenues during the opening weekend and daily revenue four weeks after the release of a movie. Preliminary results suggest that social-broadcasting-based BI systems have great potential and are worth exploring by both researchers and practitioners.Item Evaluating the effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter as new publishing platforms for newspapers(2010-05) Ju, Alice; Chyi, Hsiang Iris, 1971-; Sylvie, GeorgeWith the growing popularity of social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter, newspapers have started to use these sites as alternative platforms for news delivery. Analyzing the use of Facebook and Twitter by the top 74 U.S. newspapers, this study examines the effectiveness of social network sites as news platforms. The results showed that most of the major newspapers have adopted social network sites but reached a very limited number of subscribers. After controlling for print circulation, there is no significant correlation between the number of social network subscribers and the number of website visitors. Overall, the effectiveness of Facebook and Twitter as news platforms remained questionable.Item An examination of source credibility and word of mouth best practices for social media marketing with an emphasis on Twitter(2011-12) Alexander, Lauren Elizabeth; Wilcox, Gary B.; Atkinson, LucyBecause social media is a relatively new digital medium and Twitter is an even newer medium, it is important for practitioners and academics to understand how to create and utilize the best messaging strategies to induce persuasion, win brand advocates and create a sustainable, credible presence for brands on social media platforms such as Twitter. The author seeks to examine the theoretical and practical relevance of social media, with an emphasis on Twitter as well as explore how the theories of source credibility and word-of-mouth can help to better understand and measure promotional message and strategy effectiveness.Item Factors influencing the perceived efficacy of communicating agricultural messages through social media(2010-08) Shultz, Alyx M.; Akers, Cindy; Brashears, Michael T.; Burris, Scott; Duncan, SusanThe use of social media and specifically Twitter is a growing trend within agricultural communications. Social media allows individuals to publish content in real-time for little to no cost. This research examined the factors that lead to the perception of successful communication through Twitter. Two populations were studied, agricultural communicators who were members of 1 or more of 5 professional organizations, and members of the American Quarter Horse Association, an agriculturally-based organization that uses Twitter to communicate with members. Researchers collected data on use of Twitter, number of Tweets sent and received, number of followers and following relationships, age, time spent per day using Twitter, and use of auxiliary means to access information transmitted via Twitter. This auxiliary variable included the use of subject keywords, called hashtags, within messages, and the use of search engines to access tweets of interest. These seven variables were then regressed upon on perceived efficacy to send messages and perceived efficacy to receive messages to make two mathematical models to predict perceived efficacy of Twitter communications. The model for sending efficacy had an adjusted R2 of .215. The model for efficacy of Twitter in receiving messages had an adjusted R2 of .216. Variables that contributed the most to the models were the number of followers, number following, and the use of auxiliary means to access information. Researchers proposed a graphical model to represent communication within Twitter.Item Follow me! I will be your best friend : global marketers’ Twitter use(2011-05) Kwon, Eun Sook; Sung, Yongjun; Choi, Sejung M.Social media have grown into a powerful marketing communications tool in the global market. A number of companies are dedicating their time and resources for building trust and rapport with consumers through various social media platforms, but there is a dearth of research on their use of Twitter. The current study, therefore, examines global brands with a Twitter account and their tweets targeted at consumers. The results indicate that marketers attempt to attribute human characteristics to their brands using human representatives, personal pronouns, verbs in the imperative form. Also, satisfaction and investment were the most frequently found consumer-brand relationship determinants in the global brands’ tweets. This study offers the perspective that Twitter serves not only as an optimal vehicle for disseminating corporate information but also as a means to develop and cultivate consumer-brand relationships. Limitations and future research are discussed.Item Global brands’ social media presence and control(2011-05) Ok, Chang Bong; Sung, Yongjun; Choi, Sejung M.This paper seeks to investigate leading global brands‘ social media presence. The analysis of the Interbrand’s 100 Best Global Brands (2010) social media pages was conducted in the current study. Based on Kaplan & Haenlein‘s classification of social media, seven social media application cases were examined. The findings suggest that there are differences in global brands‘ social media presence by brand categories and social media applications. The findings also suggest that there are different levels of global brands‘ social media control. Managerial implications and guidelines for social media marketing are also provided.Item How the hashtag revolutionizes the way we collectively contend for our interests(2013-08) Borja, Eric Enrique; Young, Michael P.Political contention has entered a new age. Over the past three years unprecedented large-scale movements have challenged states across the globe, and social media has been an important component in their development and articulation. With the advent of social media sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, ordinary people have the technological ability to instantaneously transcend space, time and resources (Aouraugh and Alexander 2011; Castells 2012; Earl and Kimport 2009, 2011; Eltantawy, Nahed and Wiest 2011; Gerbaudo 2012; Hands 2011; Holmes 2012; Mason 2012). Are we currently living in a historical moment where a new repertoire of contention is emerging? If so, how is social media changing the way we collectively contest for our interests? The theoretical framework I propose in this paper advances and elaborates a social geographic approach in the framing of political contention that emphasizes the importance of the spatiality and temporality created by the hashtag (#) in the development and articulation of today's social movements. In addition to secondary sources about the protests in Brazil (#VemPraRua), I draw on participant observations to analyze a new modular form of protest I call the "hashtag movement." I claim that the hashtag (#) creates a new space/time (Massey 1992, 2007; Soja 1996) that fundamentally shifts the process of nation-ness (Anderson 2006) and marks a new phase in the mediazation of modern culture (Thompson 1991); two fundamental shifts that I argue are comparable to the structural and cultural shifts that formed the modern repertoire of contention (Anderson 2006; Della Porta and Diani 1999; McAdam 1999; McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly 2001; Sewell 1990, 1996; Swidler 1986; Tarrow 1993, 1994; Tilly 1986, 1995a, 1995b; Young 2002).Item Identity and participation in social networking sites amongst pre-service elementary school teachers(2012-08) Kimmons, Royce M.; Veletsianos, George; Wetzel, Melissa; Hughes, Joan; French, Karen; Armour, MarilynRecent trends in social networking site (SNS) use amongst teachers have led to some alarming circumstances. Practicing and pre-service teachers have been fired or otherwise punished (e.g. suspension, licensure revocation, etc.) for a variety of offenses related to their SNS use, ranging from sinister to morally ambiguous offenses, and have been encouraged or required by school administrators, professors, and others in positions of power to use SNS in particular ways. Past research on the topic of SNS in education and SNS professionalism has focused on issues of implementation (e.g. how to use SNS to support learning) or utility (e.g. how to use SNS to successfully achieve career goals). Missing from this discussion, however, is an understanding of how teachers (and those preparing to become teachers) naturally come to participate in SNS, why they participate in the ways that they do, and how this use is related to their identity. This study seeks to fill a gap in the literature by understanding pre-service teachers’ uses of SNS in terms of previous experiences, cultural expectations, social benefits, connections to identity construction and maintenance, and how these uses and beliefs regarding SNS begin to change in response to professionalization processes. Grounded theory is employed to generate an explanatory construct, which I refer to as the Acceptable Identity Fragment (AIF). The AIF is then used to understand and illustrate issues surrounding SNS use in education. Major findings suggest that 1) pre-service teachers’ identities in SNS represent a fragment of their authentic identities, 2) pre-service teachers use various SNS differently in conjunction with each SNS’s embedded values and assumptions about identity, 3) SNS use raises various problematic issues surrounding identity and how pre-service teachers are perceived and judged as individuals (e.g. digital persistence, lateral surveillance, etc.), and 4) professionalization processes alter and restrict pre-service teachers’ ability and comfort to express themselves in SNS. These findings lead to discussion, implications, and recommendations on a variety of topics including the following: institutional uses of SNS in education, relationships between fragmented and authentic identities, SNS literacy development, and cultural issues of SNS use.Item An industry in transformation : a master's report on news media economics(2011-05) Robertson, Benjamin Nicholas; Sylvie, George; Morrison, MarkThe focus of this report was the modern news media and how the industry has tried to adapt in a world where most news can be gathered with a few keystrokes for free. The report is segmented into four parts and investigates both how and what kind of news is consumed. The first part of the report focuses on the different types of news aggregators and how they affect the revenue of news sites. Pay-walls are also discussed, using The New York Times’ recent decision to charge for access to their web site as a starting point. Evidence shows that besides one glaring exception (The Wall Street Journal, which is examined as an aside) the attempts to charge customers for content that was once free have largely been fruitless. The second part investigates mobile-based applications (also known as “apps”) and their economic strengths and weaknesses; topics ranging from companies’ initial successes to the ease of piracy are examined. The third part examines the meteoric, although at times numerically misleading, rise of Twitter and its potential use as a news gathering and consuming source as well as its massive potential revenue streams. The fourth part examines what types of news are currently the most consumed, and dissects the profitability (and the attributes that lead to their popularity) of four genres: lifestyle, entertainment, business, and sports. The piece also looks at the potential of community-based, hyper-localized journalism, a venture that many claim profitable yet has failed to produce concrete results. Graphs are used as supplementary material for parts one and three. Taken as a whole, the report concludes that while there may be no sure-fire winner in the news media industry, the industry has finally shaken off the complacency that lead to hundreds of thousands of journalism jobs being lost and finally started to evolve.Item The influence of the World Wide Web on documentary form, distribution, and audience relations : the cases of Sin by Silence and This is Not a Conspiracy Theory(2015-05) Dixon, Laura Jean; Straubhaar, Joseph D.; Staiger, Janet; Stein, Laura; Downing, John; Schiesari, NancyMy dissertation focuses on the research question: How is the Internet facilitating changes in social documentary practice? More specifically, how are documentary makers rethinking documentary form, distribution, and audience relations? To shine light on this question, the dissertation examines the cases Sin by Silence and This is Not a Conspiracy Theory. To form the backdrop for understanding the case studies, the project examines the dominant discourses the trade press is using to explain what is changing in terms of form, distribution, and audience relations, providing a brief historical survey. The chapter focused on Sin by Silence uses a content analysis of social media to understand how the director used Facebook and Twitter accounts for a multitude of purposes. It argues that social media can be used to extend the narratives of films beyond the boundaries of the feature-length film and argues that the key idea of expansion can shed light on film form and audience relationships as well as the labor of the filmmaker. The case of This is Not a Conspiracy Theory demonstrates that participation and interaction can take place in the fields of distribution and funding as well as content generation, showing that an audience can be involved in a film from the very beginning throughout its life cycle. Both films demonstrate that a wide variety of media platforms can be used in the contemporary filmmaking landscape according to the requirements of the film project or energy and capabilities of the filmmakers. The rise of Internet culture and social media in particular has presented the opportunity for the audience to have a more active role in the pre-production, production, and post-production processes of filmmaking.Item Learning to write in (networked) public: children and the delivery of writing online(2014-12) Roach, Audra Katherine; Bomer, Randy; Hoffman, Jim; Maloch, Beth; Schallert, Diane; Hodgson, JustinThis investigation explored how three children (together with parents) developed networked publics that were diverse, well-connected, and powerful in the world. It was framed in response to calls in the field to better understand the new literacies young writers develop online and outside of school, and to increase literacy educators’ attention to the role of public audiences in writing and how writing is circulated. Performative case study methodology, ethnographic methods, and digital methods were employed to track and describe the online networks of three children (ages 11-13). These focal children were actively involved with their parents in social media, and had developed widespread networks with shared interests in children’s books and book reviews (Case 1), baseball (Case 2), and helping the homeless (Case 3). The children’s online networks were conceptualized as networked publics, drawing on Warner’s (2002) notion of publics as ongoing discursive relations among strangers, and on Actor-Network Theory’s notion of networks as assemblages of diverse interests that mobilize toward a common goal (Callon, 1986) and that develop stability in relation to ongoing circulations of texts (Latour, 1986; Spinuzzi, 2008). Research questions were framed broadly around the rhetorical canon of delivery [now digital delivery (Porter, 2009)], and were concerned with how writers distributed texts online, how those texts circulated, how the networked publics become more stable and powerful, and what instabilities children and parents had to negotiate in order to accomplish all of this. Data sources included interviews with 15 children and 28 adults, and fieldnotes observations of approximately 1,700 screen-captured webpages and other online artifacts. Findings showed that the young writers and their parents initiated and sustained networked publics through distribution practices that were oriented toward building trust; their texts displayed: interest, appreciation, reliability, service, credibility, and responsiveness. Both grassroots and commercial entities circulated texts in these networks, as they were sources of the ongoing renewal these different groups all needed in order to thrive. Sources of instability included conflicts over standards of writing quality, matters of profit, and the constancy of the demand to generate new interest and writing online. Children and their parents responded to these instabilities by welcoming and negotiating heterogeneous perspectives and partnerships. Implications of the study call for further research and teaching about the art of networked public discourse and digital delivery.Item Life unfiltered: Social control theory in the age of social media and substance abuse(2017-11-10) Ford, Teri L.; Gerber, JurgHirschi (1969) may have never used Social Media, received a Like or Re-Tweet or posted a heart-felt emoji, but his Social Control Theory may be affected by the actions of Social Media and its users. Hirschi’s Social Control Theory purports to explain why individuals choose to follow the rules and accept the norms of society. Hirschi postulated that there are four components in normal social systems that instill boundaries and social mores into the psyche of young adults. These four components, attachment, belief, commitment, and involvement are the four elements of social control that prevent individuals from committing crimes. If these components are diminished or eroded, it is possible that young adults may develop a system of beliefs that run contrary to the values of the society they were brought up in. Could Social Media as a dynamic environment somehow contribute to the unfiltered behavior of many members of society who are habitual or excessive users of sites like Facebook and Twitter? The question asked is whether social media promote deviance in young adults, particularly substance issues such as cigarette smoking, underage drinking, and marijuana use. The researcher hypothesizes that excessive Social Media use is eroding the components of Hirschi’s theory, particularly attachment, belief, and commitment, and that this erosion is increasing deviant habits and attitudes among excessive Social Media users.