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Crossplatform References on Social Media: Methodological Challenges and Research Avenues
Abstract
This paper studies the uses of social media from a crossplatform perspective. It firstly defines the concept of crossplatform references and the different forms they can take. A set of methodological challenges that may hinder the analysis of such references is then described, alongside with some possible solutions and tools. Promising research avenues are finally presented as a potential research agenda.
... Les usagers de ces dispositifs, contournant les gatekeepers traditionnels, ont ainsi obtenu un accès inédit à l'espace public : « Sur Internet, toutes les opinions se voient reconnaître le droit de cité par défaut, puisque tous les points sur le réseau sont techniquement à la même échelle » (Badouard, 2017 : 91). Cette démultiplication des points de vue s'accompagne de phénomènes de diffusion virale (Heimbach, Schiller, Strufe, & Hinz, 2015) pouvant se déployer à travers plusieurs plateformes en même temps (Segault, 2018). Une grande variété de discours sont par conséquent susceptibles de connaître une diffusion massive par le biais de ces outils. ...
Gephi is an open source software for graph and network analysis. It uses a 3D render engine to display large networks in real-time and to speed up the exploration. A flexible and multi-task architecture brings new possibilities to work with complex data sets and produce valuable visual results. We present several key features of Gephi in the context of interactive exploration and interpretation of networks. It provides easy and broad access to network data and allows for spatializing, filtering, navigating, manipulating and clustering. Finally, by presenting dynamic features of Gephi, we highlight key aspects of dynamic network visualization.
Increasingly employed as an umbrella term for tool-based methods employed in the digital humanities and e-social sciences, digital methods have as their point of departure a series of heuristics with respect to how to study online media (Rogers, 2013b). The first historicises the web as an object of study, one that has undergone a transformation from a (virtual) site for the study of online culture specifically to a source of data about broader societal and cultural trends. Secondly, to extract the data one not only employs crawlers, scrapers, API logins and manual means, but also pays special attention to 'query design' and 'search as research' for creating tweet collections or sets of Facebook pages for social media analysis. To study those 'natively digital' source sets, digital methods learn from the methods of the medium, e.g., recommendation systems such as trending topics or newsfeeds. How may platform treatments of retweets and likes (for example) be repurposed for studying the unfolding of historical events (on Twitter), or the most engaged with memes in a political campaign (on Facebook)? Digital methods, finally, consider the conditions of proof. When does it makes sense to ground the findings (about the versions of historical events represented by Google search results, for example) in the particular characteristics and influences of online data, and when is 'online groundedness' less robust than mixed methods approaches?
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The research takes the World Wide Web as its object of study, and introduces the ontological distinction between the objects, content, devices and environments that are 'born' in the new medium (the natively digital), as opposed to those that have 'migrated' to it (the digitized). It asks, should the current methods of study change given the focus on objects and content of the medium? The work thereby engages with 'virtual methods,' the current, dominant methodological approach to the study of the Internet, which imports standard methods from the social sciences and the humanities. That is, the distinction between the natively digital and the digitized also could apply to research methods. What kind of Internet research may be performed with methods that have been digitized (such as online surveys and directories) vis-à-vis those that are natively digital (such as recommendation systems and folksonomy)?
Second, Internet research may be put to new uses, given an emphasis on natively digital methods as opposed to the digitized. I seek to shift the attention from the opportunities afforded by transforming ink into bits, and also inquire into how research with the Internet may move beyond the study of online culture only. In order to do so, the overall digital methods research program builds software for collecting, storing, analyzing and visualizing online dynamics. How to capture and analyze hyperlinks, tags, search engine queries and other digital objects? How may one learn from how online devices (e.g., engines and recommendation systems) make use of the objects, and how may such uses be repurposed for social and cultural research? Ultimately, the project proposes a research practice that grounds claims about cultural change and societal conditions in online dynamics, introducing the term 'digital groundedness.' The overall aim is to rework method for Internet research, developing a novel strand of study, digital methods.
The use of Internet technology for solicitation by sex workers has raised important legal and regulatory questions. We provide a description of the new institutions that facilitate prostitution online, and their potential market effects. We then supply some of the first evidence on several key parameters of interest to policymakers. First, we find that workers who solicit online largely represent growth in the overall prostitution market, as opposed to simple displacement of the off-line, street-focused market, although we find sizeable displacement effects among sex workers in their 30s and 40s. Using a newly-implemented survey, we also find that most sex workers who solicit online engage in lower-risk behaviors than traditional street-based workers; however, workers close to the margin for migration from outdoor work bring riskier business and sexual practices with them as they enter the off-street-sector.
The concept of Social Media is top of the agenda for many business executives today. Decision makers, as well as consultants, try to identify ways in which firms can make profitable use of applications such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, Second Life, and Twitter. Yet despite this interest, there seems to be very limited understanding of what the term “Social Media” exactly means; this article intends to provide some clarification. We begin by describing the concept of Social Media, and discuss how it differs from related concepts such as Web 2.0 and User Generated Content. Based on this definition, we then provide a classification of Social Media which groups applications currently subsumed under the generalized term into more specific categories by characteristic: collaborative projects, blogs, content communities, social networking sites, virtual game worlds, and virtual social worlds. Finally, we present 10 pieces of advice for companies which decide to utilize Social Media.
We analyze microblog posts generated during two recent, concurrent emergency events in North America via Twitter, a popular microblogging service. We focus on communications broadcast by people who were "on the ground" during the Oklahoma Grassfires of April 2009 and the Red River Floods that occurred in March and April 2009, and identify information that may contribute to enhancing situational awareness (SA). This work aims to inform next steps for extracting useful, relevant information during emergencies using information extraction (IE) techniques.
Gephi is an open source software for graph and network analysis. It uses a 3D render engine to display large networks in real-time and to speed up the exploration. A flexible and multi-task architecture brings new possibilities to work with complex data sets and produce valuable visual results. We present several key features of Gephi in the context of interactive exploration and interpretation of networks. It provides easy and broad access to network data and allows for spatializing, filtering, navigating, manipulating and clustering. Finally, by presenting dynamic features of Gephi, we highlight key aspects of dynamic network visualization.
Online community sites have replaced the traditional means of keeping a community informed via libraries and publishing. At present, online communities are islands that are not interlinked. We describe dif- ferent types of online communities and tools that are currently used to build and support such communities. Ontologies and Semantic Web tech- nologies oer an upgrade path to providing more complex services. Fus- ing information and inferring links between the various applications and types of information provides relevant insights that make the available information on the Internet more valuable. We present the SIOC ontol- ogy which combines terms from vocabularies that already exist with new terms needed to describe the relationships between concepts in the realm of online community sites.
Abstract Social network,sites,(SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic,and,industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach.,This special theme section of the,Journal,of Computer-Mediated,Communicationbrings ,together scholarship on these emergent phenomena.,In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles,in this special section and conclude with considerations for future,research.
During the course of several natural disasters in recent years, Twitter has been found to play an important role as an additional medium for many-to-many crisis communication. Emergency services are successfully using Twitter to inform the public about current developments, and are increasingly also attempting to source first-hand situational information from Twitter feeds (such as relevant hashtags). The further study of the uses of Twitter during natural disasters relies on the development of flexible and reliable research infrastructure for tracking and analysing Twitter feeds at scale and in close to real time, however. This article outlines two approaches to the development of such infrastructure: one which builds on the readily available open source platform yourTwapperkeeper to provide a low-cost, simple, and basic solution; and, one which establishes a more powerful and flexible framework by drawing on highly scaleable, state-of-the-art technology.
This paper reports some preliminary work that seeks to fill a blind spot in the literature of Internet uses, namely the multiplication of transplatform practices in social media. I mobilize a conceptual frame in usages sociology and Media Studies to understand those practices through the lens of self-presentation in social media. Drawing from data from a case study among independent podcasters, I find a trend in social media, where content converge towards the social network platform Facebook.
In February 2008, the New York Times published an unusual chart of box office revenues for 7500 movies over 21 years. The chart was based on a similar visualization, developed by the first author, that displayed trends in music listening. This paper describes the design decisions and algorithms behind these graphics, and discusses the reaction on the Web. We suggest that this type of complex layered graph is effective for displaying large data sets to a mass audience. We provide a mathematical analysis of how this layered graph relates to traditional stacked graphs and to techniques such as ThemeRiver, showing how each method is optimizing a different “energy function”. Finally, we discuss techniques for coloring and ordering the layers of such graphs. Throughout the paper, we emphasize the interplay between considerations of aesthetics and legibility.
Abstract This paper presents some of the findings from a recent project that conducted a virtual ethnographic study of three formal courses in higher education that use ‘Web 2.0’ or social technologies for learning and teaching. It describes the pedagogies adopted within these courses, and goes on to explore some key themes emerging from the research and relating to the pedagogical use of weblogs and wikis in particular. These themes relate primarily to the academy's tendency to constrain and contain the possibly more radical effects of these new spaces. Despite this, the findings present a range of student and tutor perspectives which show that these technologies have significant potential as new collaborative, volatile and challenging environments for formal learning.
Alvin Toffler’s image of the prosumer (1970, 1980, 1990) continues to influence in a significant way our understanding of the user-led, collaborative processes of content creation which are today labelled “social media” or “Web 2.0”. A closer look at Toffler’s own description of his prosumer model reveals, however, that it remains firmly grounded in the mass media age: the prosumer is clearly not the self-motivated creative originator and developer of new content which can today be observed in projects ranging from open source software through Wikipedia to Second Life, but simply a particularly well-informed, and therefore both particularly critical and particularly active, consumer. The highly specialised, high end consumers which exist in areas such as hi-fi or car culture are far more representative of the ideal prosumer than the participants in non-commercial (or as yet non-commercial) collaborative projects. And to expect Toffler’s 1970s model of the prosumer to describe these 21st-century phenomena was always an unrealistic expectation, of course.
To describe the creative and collaborative participation which today characterises user-led projects such as Wikipedia, terms such as ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ are no longer particularly useful – even in laboured constructions such as ‘commons-based peer-production’ (Benkler 2006) or ‘p2p production’ (Bauwens 2005). In the user communities participating in such forms of content creation, roles as consumers and users have long begun to be inextricably interwoven with those as producer and creator: users are always already also able to be producers of the shared information collection, regardless of whether they are aware of that fact – they have taken on a new, hybrid role which may be best described as that of a produser (Bruns 2008). Projects which build on such produsage can be found in areas from open source software development through citizen journalism to Wikipedia, and beyond this also in multi-user online computer games, filesharing, and even in communities collaborating on the design of material goods. While addressing a range of different challenges, they nonetheless build on a small number of universal key principles. This paper documents these principles and indicates the possible implications of this transition from production and prosumption to produsage.
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