We’re going to Hawaii…er…Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences!
Want to learn about how you can effectively research social media? We’ll be running a workshop at HICSS (http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu) in January of 2013 — come join us in sunny Hawaii and learn the ins and outs of social media research using a hands-on approach to skill building. Bring a laptop and some flip-flops…the full text of the accepted proposal is after the break.
Read More
Dynamics of Attention in Networked Spaces: modeling information movements
In our digitally mediated world information that we might wish to remain private can be copied, shared and spread in a viral-like fashion, reaching millions of people. Alternately, content we create and share with the hope of grabbing the public’s attention, may remain stubbornly obscure despite our best promotion efforts. So, while our networked world offers the potential for empowering citizens and consumers, the dynamics of human attention suggest that we may have little control over information artifacts once we make them public.
Using R to Visualizing Information Flows on Wikipedia Talk Pages
Wikipedia talk pages allow editors to discuss the evolving content on related Wikipedia articles. Sometimes the topic of a page is controversial and the talk page threads can become heated with different posts invoking a wide range of values in the kinds of appeals they use in their arguments. For example, in one thread you could have someone arguing that it is morally wrong to expose people to specific content, but others may argue in favor of posting the content on the grounds that Wikipedia’s mission is to provide free access to information. But as a social scientist interested in visualizing information flows, the question is: how do you visualize the change in time of overall thread volume and posts per-thread, while also capturing threads that are rich in valued appeals?
Geolocating the #Occupy movement – surprising results and importance of scale!
We’ve been working hard at SoMe Lab to begin processing some of the Twitter data we’ve pulled. We’ve found some surprising results! Click through to view maps and read interpretations of Twitter data as they relate to particular #occupy movements (#ows, #occupyseattle, and #occupyoakland / #oo).
Read More(Talk) Not Your Parents’ Protest: New Forms of Political Political Participation and Social Media
Video of Shawn Walker’s Feb 8th talk at Town Hall on political participation and social media.
Social-media sites are no longer just where we connect with friends, says Shawn Walker—but are they a valid form of political participation? This companion piece to the Wael Ghonim lecture earlier this evening addresses the use of these powerful forms of communication in the United States, particularly by Occupy Wall Street and other movements. Walker is a doctoral candidate at the UW’s Information School. Presented by Engage: The Science Speaker Series as part of Seattle Science Lectures, with the University of Washington, Pacific Science Center and University Book Store. Series sponsored by Microsoft. Series media sponsorship provided by KPLU.
Read More
Social Media as the Middle Ground
Social media has characteristics of both interpersonal communication and mass communication that empowers people in new ways. Mass communication has traditionally broadcast messages to an aggregated audience, while interpersonal communication has been a direct person-to-person communication. Another way to think of this difference is that broadcasters send messaged to their audiences in a one-to-many fashion whereas individuals communicating do so one-to-one. But social media occupies a middle ground between the two of many-to-many communication. How does this work and how does it empower people?
OWS: Organizational Perspectives
Why OWS is Intriguing to Us
The Occupy movement, with its fierce determination to avoid hierarchy and the appearance of leaders, illustrates an attempt to create and maintain cohesion without a hierarchical structure or even a so-called ‘flat’ organizational structure. From an organizational research perspective, OWS represents a kind of natural experiment with an untested model of organizational governance and collaboration. The movement provides organizational researchers with a chance to witness, in real time, what types of coordinating mechanisms develop from this deliberate and shared effort to avoid any kind of predetermined arrangements. What we have a chance to observe is the potential emergence of structure from a complex, adaptive system of autonomous agents whose communication across time and geography is enabled by new social media platforms.
Read More