Zachary Devereaux

Nexalogy Environics

Over the past decade, addressing chronic diseases has emerged as a major policy issue for governments in Canada and internationally. Within this policy context, Canada has made significant progress in reducing tobacco use and is recognized as a world leader on tobacco control policy. Examining the public discourse in Canada around tobacco control p...

This article examines the Scientific, Journalistic, and Social Media publications about Nanotechnology in Canada via scientometric analysis to identify the top authors, institutes, and themes taking place in 2008 around the subject. The report was presented to the OECD working party on Nanotechnology http://www.oecd.org/sti/nano/42326281.pdf

Object-oriented programming was a major revolution in software coding that enabled graphic user interfaces and encapsulation of functions within programming objects. Bruno Latour famously asked "What would an object-oriented democracy look like?" This dissertation takes the question seriously and demonstrates how object-orientation relates to polit...

Abstract: Object-oriented programming was a major revolution in software coding that enabled graphic user interfaces and encapsulation of functions within programming objects. Bruno Latour importantly asked "What would an object-oriented democracy look like?" This paper takes the question seriously and evaluates how object-orientation relates to po...

The significant and reciprocal link between Terrorism and News Media reportage was identified in the 1990s by the convergence of security and media studies (Picard, 1993). Working in the tradition of content analysis, early studies examined the way terrorism was framed in major news accounts with implications for the Huntington-Fukuyama hypothesis...

What can hyperlinkage analysis tell us about advocacy networks? This paper examines the pro and anti gun control movements in North America using hyperlinkage analysis. Hyperlinks benefit “issue-networks” because they represent the connections of one group to another. We use the Issue Crawler software to determine how gun advocacy networks are link...

: Through three case studies of online political activism on Facebook, this article conceptualizes the deployment of issue publics (Lippmann, 1993; Marres, 2005) on Facebook. We argue that issue publics on Facebook come into being through a specific set of double articulations of code and politics that link and reshape informational processes, comm...

This article builds upon current hyperlink mapping research to determine the degree of party loyalty and partisanship in the Canadian political blogosphere. The article develops a hyperlink-based method of determining blogger endorsements as a means of tracking cross-party recommendations. The article concludes that bloggers affiliated with the gov...

Panel abstract: Although the full range of new media has yet to be defined, traditional media such as journalism, music, film, photography, sculpture, theater, the written and spoken word, performance and installation art are all morphing as digital, socially networked technologies present new opportunities. Hybrid new media objects and environment...

This paper examines why certain videos go viral while other languish and die. To answer this question metadata associated with YouTube videos was collected (over the course of three separate weeks in 2009) and analyzed. The results show that virality is intimately connected to how one defines popularity, as different components of the metadata high...

This paper discusses early findings and methodological pitfalls of a study of a hyper-mediated election campaign in Canada. Web logs - or "blogs" - serve as the primary object of study. The paper focuses on possible sources of large scale data (aggregated blogger posts) and methods of determining the political influence of bloggers. A series of met...

Online issue mapping uses interactive network or topic maps to relate information sources to each other and to their respective uses of key terms. This strategy prioritizes the ability of visualization systems to show complex data that change over time. Our research applies combinations of software in a cross-disciplinary technique well suited to t...

We examine two technologies for harvesting web information—issue crawling and web scraping—and apply them to the question of how the information design and visualization research communities can be understood through their presence online. We note the participation of the military-industrial complex, as well as the changing appearance of the academ...

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts, Dept. of Political Science, University of Alberta. "Fall, 2005." Thesis (M.A.)--University of Alberta, 2005. Includes bibliographical references.

The purpose of this project is to investigate the changing contexts of meaning and practice in Chinese adoption by mapping online networks of adoption-related groups and issues in Canada. The resulting data set contributes to scholarly knowledge in the areas of transnational identity formation, comparative social and national contexts of adoption,...