Browsing by Subject "social media"
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Item A Uses and Gratifications Case Study of Trinity Waters Facebook Page Followers(2013-07-29) Hunt, Pamela SueDue to the advancement of the Internet, information delivery has been forever changed. Technology rapidly outpaces traditional methods of conveying educational material. As a result, educators must seek non-traditional methods to deliver information. The use of social media outlets such as Facebook is one avenue of information delivery. The purpose of this study was to determine the uses and gratifications of the followers of the Trinity Waters Facebook page. A qualitative research design and purposeful sampling of (n=9) respondents were employed in this study. A semi-structured interview protocol was utilized in order to direct the study?s research objectives. Respondents? desire increased availability of information and greater opportunities to establish networks with contemporaries. In addition, respondents sought practical information that could be applied to their daily pursuits. This study showed that followers of the Trinity Waters Facebook page want a greater amount of educational information disseminated through the page. As a result of this study, Trinity Waters should continue to seek out and distribute information that is significant and specific to the Trinity River basin. Trinity Waters should continue to pursue and disseminate information on current legislative or political actions that are specific to the Trinity River basin and also the state and federal levels. Events, meetings or seminars pertaining to the Trinity River basin and conservation efforts should be actively promoted by Trinity Waters via the Facebook platform. This study should be replicated with other extension programs throughout the state and nation. Further research should also be conducted on the implication of Facebook and social media in extension education settings.Item Animating Digital Libraries(2016-05-24) Williamson, James; Southern Methodist UniversityCultural heritage institutions and archival repositories are increasing their presence online with social media and are working to make a bigger impact online while making the best use of staff time. One of the ways that these institutions have been successful in reaching communities on social media has been through the adoption of internet communication and language. Significantly, more institutions are using frame animation to create GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format). GIFs created from movies, TV shows, artwork, etc. are ubiquitous on the internet. By taking physical and digital materials from their collections and manipulated them to create looping videos, animated artwork, and 3D models, institutions have found a way to adapt this internet currency to promote their archival holdings. This workshop will instruct participants on how to use image editing tools to create 3 types of GIFs used by cultural heritage institutions and archival repositories on the web. The instructor will lay out the underlying techniques that go into creating these GIFs step by step. The first part of the workshop will facilitate the use of several still images of an object to create a 3D like model. The second part of the workshop will help participants work with digitized video to create a looping video. The third part of the workshop will train participants to animate a piece of artwork. The workshop will conclude with a discussion on the issues surrounding the use of these techniques and how they can be addressed. The workshop will last 2 hours. Participants in the workshop will need to bring their own laptop along with a version of either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Both are available as a trial version for 30 days. To better facilitate hands on instruction, the number of participants will need to be capped at 25Item The Black Lives Matter Video Project: Building a Digital Collection for the Preservation of Social Justice Materials(Texas Digital Library, 2021-05-24) Cress, Laurier; Bokencamp, Katie; Cherry, CarrieItem Combating Crowdsourced Manipulation of Social Media(2013-08-01) Tamilarasan, PrithiviCrowdsourcing systems - like Ushahidi (for crisis mapping), Foldit (for protein folding) and Duolingo (for foreign language learning and translation) - have shown the effectiveness of intelligently organizing large numbers of people to solve traditionally vexing problems. Unfortunately, new crowdsourcing platforms are emerging to support the coordinated dissemination of spam, misinformation, and propaganda. These ?crowdturfing? systems are a sinister counterpart to the enormous positive opportunities of crowdsourcing; they combine the organizational capabilities of crowdsourcing with the ability to widely spread artificial grass root support (so called ?astroturfing?). This thesis begins a study of crowdturfing that targets social media and proposes a framework for ?pulling back the curtain? on crowdturfers to reveal their underlying ecosystem. Concretely, this thesis (i) analyzes the types of campaigns hosted on multiple crowdsourcing sites; (ii) links campaigns and their workers on crowdsourcing sites to social media; (iii) analyzes the relationship structure connecting these workers, their profile, activity, and linguistic characteristics, in comparison with a random sample of regular social media users; and (iv) proposes and develops statistical user models to automatically identify crowdturfers in social media. Since many crowdturfing campaigns are hidden, it is important to understand the potential of learning models from known campaigns to detect these unknown campaigns. Our experimental results show that the statistical user models built can predict crowdturfers with very high accuracy.Item From Writers and Readers to Participants: A Rhetorical/Historical Perspective on Authorship in Social Media(2012-10-19) Melzow, CandiceDespite the recent growth of social media, rhetorical theory which addresses authorship in this realm has been slow to develop. Static terms such as "reader," "writer," and "author" are often used to refer to the roles occupied by users in social media, although these terms are insufficient to describe the dynamic rhetorical exchange which occurs there. The goal of this dissertation is to use rhetorical theory to develop an updated terminology to describe the model(s) adopted by creators of social media content. First, past models of authorship are surveyed to locate rhetorical precedents for the model(s) that currently exists in social media. After comparing potential historical precedents to the overall process of content creation in social media, the term "participant" is adopted to describe the roles which users assume when creating digital content. Although "participant" initially appears to be an appropriate term, this notion is complicated when one considers the asymmetrical roles adopted on a smaller scale in genres such as social networking and blogs. To determine if the "participant" model is still applicable in such cases, an examination of authorship as it occurs in the genre of women's personal blogs is conducted. An analysis of the terms that bloggers use to refer to themselves as writers reveals that bloggers situate themselves in roles through which they claim to speak for a group such as storyteller and truth-teller. Subsequent examination of the interactions between bloggers and other participants reveals that bloggers negotiate authority with readers in a variety of ways. By using such strategies, bloggers attempt to situate themselves as community members in a manner which aligns with the "participant" model. The participant role adopted in women's personal blogs helps this previously marginalized group to establish a public presence and may also serve as a precedent for models which could be adopted by learners in the composition classroom as they strive to break free from the author/student writer binary and to establish themselves as socially-engaged participants.Item Hiring practices correlations between law enforcement and social media(Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas (LEMIT), 2015) Lunsford, Stephen J.Item @InstitutionalRepository How Do I Preserve Internet Ephemera? #Twitter #Wordpress(2013-03-26) Gaede, Franny; University of Texas at AustinUniversity repositories are tasked with collecting and preserving the intellectual output of their institutions. Colleges and departments are adopting social media to connect with alumni, participate in disciplinary conversations, and encourage community engagement. These ephemeral communications must be captured and preserved to ensure a comprehensive record of the university’s scholarly output. Developing a standard for ingesting and describing these materials poses a novel challenge. This poster will present, as a case study, the specific challenges faced by the University of Texas Digital Repository when preserving the Department of American Studies’ Twitter feed (@AmStudies) and Wordpress blog (AMS::ATX). It will recommend best practices for preservation and access, including content capture, file formats, and metadata standards.Item Law Enforcement Agencies Should Use Social Media(Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas (LEMIT), 2016) Andreucci, RichardLaw enforcement agencies are slowly adopting social media platforms to assist them in connecting to their citizenry. Law enforcement has little to no control over the message the media delivers about them. This lack of ability needs to be addressed and remedied. Law enforcement can use social media to provide information not published by traditional news organizations. This information can range from road closures to a monthly crime blotter detailing the calls for service on a weekly or monthly basis. Law enforcement should use social media as a resource to enhance their relationship with their citizenry, control their media presence, assist in criminal investigation, and provide a new line of communication. This paper will show the need for the use of social media exists and is currently being used by many larger agencies.Item Location Prediction in Social Media Based on Tie Strength(2013-04-29) McGee, Jeffrey AWe propose a novel network-based approach for location estimation in social media that integrates evidence of the social tie strength between users for improved location estimation. Concretely, we propose a location estimator ? FriendlyLocation? that leverages the relationship between the strength of the tie between a pair of users, and the distance between the pair. Based on an examination of over 100 million geo-encoded tweets and 73 million Twitter user profiles, we identify several factors such as the number of followers and how the users interact that can strongly reveal the distance between a pair of users. We use these factors to train a decision tree to distinguish between pairs of users who are likely to live nearby and pairs of users who are likely to live in different areas. We use the results of this decision tree as the input to a maximum likelihood estimator to predict a user?s location. We find that this proposed method significantly improves the results of location estimation relative to a state-of-the-art technique. Our system reduces the average error distance for 80% of Twitter users from 40 miles to 21 miles using only information from the user?s friends and friends-of-friends, which has great significance for augmenting traditional social media and enriching location-based services with more refined and accurate location estimates.Item Looking Through the Eyes of Texas(2013-03-26) Brassie, Tanya; Serrano, Ann; University of Texas at Austin; Briscoe Center for American HistoryThis poster will describe the creation and advertisement of a virtual historic walking tour for the University of Texas at Austin using HistoryPin, a publicly available interactive website based on linking or “pinning” historic images to an interactive map. The project demonstrates how HistoryPin can be a powerful tool for creating meaningful, accessible exhibits; anyone with the Internet can explore the University’s rich heritage while learning more about its present. Since its founding, The University of Texas has witnessed 130 years of dramatic change. With the virtual tour, this change can be re-experienced through the juxtaposition of historic images of student life and campus architecture with corresponding contemporary images. Historic materials were provided by The University of Texas at Austin's Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, which serves as the University's archive, housing thousands of historic images, books, ephemera, and manuscripts. The curation process for the tour included selecting materials from the Briscoe Center’s vast holdings for digitizaton, assigning metadata to newly digitized items, uploading photos to HistoryPin. After creating the exhibit using HistoryPin’s tour function, it will then be promoted and presented for use during Explore UT, the University’s open house event.Item Ranking, Labeling, and Summarizing Short Text in Social Media(2013-04-18) Khabiri, ElhamOne of the key features driving the growth and success of the Social Web is large-scale participation through user-contributed content ? often through short text in social media. Unlike traditional long-form documents ? e.g., Web pages, blog posts ? these short text resources are typically quite brief (on the order of 100s of characters), often of a personal nature (reflecting opinions and reactions of users), and being generated at an explosive rate. Coupled with this explosion of short text in social media is the need for new methods to organize, monitor, and distill relevant information from these large-scale social systems, even in the face of the inherent ?messiness? of short text, considering the wide variability in quality, style, and substance of short text generated by a legion of Social Web participants. Hence, this dissertation seeks to develop new algorithms and methods to ensure the continued growth of the Social Web by enhancing how users engage with short text in social media. Concretely, this dissertation takes a three-fold approach: First, this dissertation develops a learning-based algorithm to automatically rank short text comments associated with a Social Web object (e.g., Web document, image, video) based on the expressed preferences of the community itself, so that low-quality short text may be filtered and user attention may be focused on highly-ranked short text. Second, this dissertation organizes short text through labeling, via a graph- based framework for automatically assigning relevant labels to short text. In this way meaningful semantic descriptors may be assigned to short text for improved classification, browsing, and visualization. Third, this dissertation presents a cluster-based summarization approach for extracting high-quality viewpoints expressed in a collection of short text, while maintaining diverse viewpoints. By summarizing short text, user attention may quickly assess the aggregate viewpoints expressed in a collection of short text, without the need to scan each of possibly thousands of short text items.Item Scanning social networking sites as part of a hiring process(2013-08-16) Fowler, Kevin Michael; Fowler, Kevin Michael; Schell, Kraig; Schell, Kraig; Stenmark, Cheryl; Mowrer, Robert; Pullin, MarkThis study examined the relationship between personality ratings based on Facebook profiles and ratings of favorability for hire (FFH) for mock “applicants”. The relationship between the amount of Facebook information available to view and FFH was also explored. Participants viewed screenshots taken from the applicants’ Facebook profiles and rated five personality traits and FFH. Descriptive statistics revealed that FFH ratings and final hiring decisions often did not match. Also, it was found that Conscientiousness was correlated with FFH. There was no relationship between available information and the FFH rating. Discussion focuses on ramifications, limitations, and future research directions.Item Social media and its effects on law enforcement(Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas (LEMIT), 2015) Becker Jr., Robert L.Item Social media: an indispensable tool for law enforcement(Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas (LEMIT), 2016) Fletcher, Billy OranItem Streaming Texas - A Case Study of the Texas Archive of the Moving Imager(2012-05-25) Peck, Megan; Texas Archive of the Moving ImageIn an online environment proliferated by video, but in which few organizations are independently streaming their own content, the Texas Archive of the Moving Image (TAMI) has rapidly developed as a leader in the field. TAMI is an independent 501(c)3 organization dedicated to promoting the preservation of and access to Texas’ moving image heritage. The organization’s focus is to digitize and provide easy access to these materials via the web, communicating Texas history across the state, nation, and world. Since kick off of their main program, The Texas Film Round Up in 2008, the archive has digitized nearly 14,000 moving image items, of which over 1,500 have been described and uploaded for free public access in the Online Video Library. Elizabeth Hansen, Director of Outreach and Education, and Megan Peck, Digital Librarian, will present a case study of TAMI’s approach to connecting with communities, both online and real world. The discussion will address a number of considerations used to develop a holistic strategy for connecting with users. This strategy incorporates social media and other tools used to invite the public to the library, as well as measures to shape the library user’s experience, such as the building and curation of relevant collections, and the providing of a crowd sourcing tool to foster user participation and contribution. The panel will report on successes achieved and challenges faced in its implementation and management of this strategy, and show off some selections from the collection.Item The management challenges of social media for law enforcement employees(Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas (LEMIT), 2016) Summitt, James C.Item TweetBubble: A Twitter Extension Stimulates Exploratory Browsing(2014-11-14) Ajit Jain, -We extend the Twitter interface to stimulate exploratory browsing of social media and develop a method to establish its efficacy. In exploratory browsing, users seek and traverse diverse and novel information as they investigate a conceptual space. Social media has become a predominant source of information. Social media is characterized by rapidly evolving content and relationships. We need interface mechanisms to effectively and iteratively browse, search, and filter, i.e., explore vast social media networks. We develop the TweetBubble browser extension, extending Twitter to enable expansion of social media associations @usernames and #hashtags in-context, with-out overwriting initial content. We build on a prior metadata type system, developing new presentation semantics, which enable a look and feel consistent with Twitter. We identify exploratory browsing as a creative ideation process. We use prior ideation metrics as a basis for new ideation metrics of exploratory browsing. We conducted a study, with data from 54 participants, amidst the 2014 Academy Awards. Quantitative and qualitative findings validate the technique of in-context exploratory browsing interfaces for social media. Their consistency supports the validity of ideation metrics of exploratory browsing as an evaluation methodology for interactive systems designed to promote creative engagement. This research impacts the design and evaluation of interfaces that stimulate intrapersonal creativity, and thereby mutual understanding, by supporting exploratory browsing of connected perspectives in a shared, structured, conceptual space.Item Utilizing social media in a law enforcement setting(Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas (LEMIT), 2015) Ryman, Clayton