672 research outputs found

    Nowcasting user behaviour with social media and smart devices on a longitudinal basis: from macro- to micro-level modelling

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    The adoption of social media and smart devices by millions of users worldwide over the last decade has resulted in an unprecedented opportunity for NLP and social sciences. Users publish their thoughts and opinions on everyday issues through social media platforms, while they record their digital traces through their smart devices. Mining these rich resources offers new opportunities in sensing real-world events and indices (e.g., political preference, mental health indices) in a longitudinal fashion, either at the macro (population)-, or at the micro(user)-level. The current project aims at developing approaches to “nowcast" (predict the current state of) such indices at both levels of granularity. First, we build natural language resources for the static tasks of sentiment analysis, emotion disclosure and sarcasm detection over user-generated content. These are important for opinion monitoring on a large scale. Second, we propose a general approach that leverages textual data derived from generic social media streams to nowcast political indices at the macro-level. Third, we leverage temporally sensitive and asynchronous information to nowcast the political stance of social media users, at the micro-level using multiple kernel learning. We then focus further on the micro-level modelling, to account for heterogeneous data sources, such as information derived from users' smart phones, SMS and social media messages, to nowcast time-varying mental health indices of a small cohort of users on a longitudinal basis. Finally, we present the challenges faced when applying such micro-level approaches in a real-world setting and propose directions for future research

    Incentives for the adoption of e-government by Greek municipalities

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    Purpose: The research aims to identify the incentives that play an important role in the evolution of e-government in Greece at local scale and its actual development level. It also investigates the factors and the perceived barriers that affect the development of local egovernment in Greek Municipalities, as well as the benefits they derive from it. Design/Methodology/Approach: The research is based on a survey that was conducted through a questionnaire to all 325 Municipalities of the country and includes data from 109 Municipalities that participated in the quantitative approach. Findings: While e-government is spread at a relatively satisfactory level, it appears that only a few Municipalities are performing well. Results highlight also the two main incentives that motivate Municipalities to adopt e-government: The first is the improvement of the efficiency of information exchange with the external environment and the second is managing internal issues-relationships in conjunction with the existence of prominent IT departments. Amongst the main factors that affect e-government adoption by Local authorities, budgetary constraints stand out, while the lack of personnel specialized in Information Technologies is identified as common obstacle. Practical Implications: Findings suggest that an integrated approach to e-government is needed in order to enable organizations to minimize failures and to overcome barriers and counter risks. The capacity to align e-government applications with the increasing and evolving needs and requirements of the citizens is the key to optimizing the benefits of eGovernment at local scale. Originality/Value: There is no similar empirical research in the context of Greece; hence, it seems important to increase the knowledge about the drivers of e-government adoption, especially in the public sector at the local scale.peer-reviewe

    Measuring objective and subjective well-being: dimensions and data sources

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    AbstractWell-being is an important value for people's lives, and it could be considered as an index of societal progress. Researchers have suggested two main approaches for the overall measurement of well-being, the objective and the subjective well-being. Both approaches, as well as their relevant dimensions, have been traditionally captured with surveys. During the last decades, new data sources have been suggested as an alternative or complement to traditional data. This paper aims to present the theoretical background of well-being, by distinguishing between objective and subjective approaches, their relevant dimensions, the new data sources used for their measurement and relevant studies. We also intend to shed light on still barely unexplored dimensions and data sources that could potentially contribute as a key for public policing and social development

    Mediatisation in Twitter: an exploratory analysis of the 2015 Spanish general election

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    [EN] The mediatisation model in politics assumes that media conveys political messages between parties and citizenship, with the risk of promoting issues that frame the electoral content in terms of competition. These dynamics could distract from the debate of ideas and political policies. However, digital media like Twitter provide direct communication channels between parties, candidates and users. The present research explores Twitter content during an electoral campaign focused on the four issues proposed by Patterson (1980) to assess mediatisation: political, policy, campaign and personal (regarding the candidate). The goal of this research study is to evaluate the degree of mediatisation on Twitter using this typology. The research also evaluates the influence of the issue on retweet volume. The study¿s basis was a 15.8 million-tweet corpus obtained during the 2015 Spanish General Election pre-campaign and campaign. This dataset was analysed using an automatic classification system. The results highlighted a predominance of policy issues during both the pre- campaign and campaign, except for the two televised debates, during which campaign issues were the most prevalent. On the election night, users commented much more on political issues. Finally, the kind of issue most likely to be retweeted was policy issues.This research was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, with Grants CSO2013-43960-R (Los flujos de comunicación en los procesos de movilización política: medios, blogs y líderes de opinión) and CSO2016-77331-C2-1-R (Estrategias, agendas y discursos en las cibercampañas electorales: medios de comunicación y ciudadanos).Baviera, T.; Calvo, D.; Llorca-Abad, G. (2019). Mediatisation in Twitter: an exploratory analysis of the 2015 Spanish general election. 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Political candidates in infotainment programmes and their emotional effects on Twitter: an analysis of the 2015 Spanish general elections pre-campaign season. Contemporary Social Science, 14(1), 144-156. doi:10.1080/21582041.2017.1367833BLUMLER, J. G., & KAVANAGH, D. (1999). The Third Age of Political Communication: Influences and Features. Political Communication, 16(3), 209-230. doi:10.1080/105846099198596Bor, S. E. (2013). Using Social Network Sites to Improve Communication Between Political Campaigns and Citizens in the 2012 Election. American Behavioral Scientist, 58(9), 1195-1213. doi:10.1177/0002764213490698Brants, K., & Neijens, P. (1998). The Infotainment of Politics. Political Communication, 15(2), 149-164. doi:10.1080/10584609809342363Burnap, P., Gibson, R., Sloan, L., Southern, R., & Williams, M. (2016). 140 characters to victory?: Using Twitter to predict the UK 2015 General Election. Electoral Studies, 41, 230-233. doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2015.11.017Campos-Domínguez, E. (2017). Twitter y la comunicación política. El Profesional de la Información, 26(5), 785. doi:10.3145/epi.2017.sep.01Campos-Domínguez, E., & Calvo, D. (2017). Electoral campaign on the Internet: Planning, impact and viralization on Twitter during the Spanish general election, 2015. Comunicación y Sociedad, 0(29), 93-116. doi:10.32870/cys.v0i29.6423Ceron, A., & Splendore, S. (2016). From contents to comments: Social TV and perceived pluralism in political talk shows. New Media & Society, 20(2), 659-675. doi:10.1177/1461444816668187Chadwick, A. (2013). The Hybrid Media System. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199759477.001.0001Conway, B. A., Kenski, K., & Wang, D. (2015). The Rise of Twitter in the Political Campaign: Searching for Intermedia Agenda-Setting Effects in the Presidential Primary. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 20(4), 363-380. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12124Couldry, N., & Hepp, A. (2013). Conceptualizing Mediatization: Contexts, Traditions, Arguments. Communication Theory, 23(3), 191-202. doi:10.1111/comt.12019Dang-Xuan, L., Stieglitz, S., Wladarsch, J., & Neuberger, C. (2013). AN INVESTIGATION OF INFLUENTIALS AND THE ROLE OF SENTIMENT IN POLITICAL COMMUNICATION ON TWITTER DURING ELECTION PERIODS. Information, Communication & Society, 16(5), 795-825. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2013.783608D’heer, E., & Verdegem, P. (2014). Conversations about the elections on Twitter: Towards a structural understanding of Twitter’s relation with the political and the media field. European Journal of Communication, 29(6), 720-734. doi:10.1177/0267323114544866Díaz-Parra, I., & Jover-Báez, J. (2016). Social movements in crisis? From the 15-M movement to the electoral shift in Spain. International Journal of Sociology and Social Policy, 36(9/10), 680-694. doi:10.1108/ijssp-09-2015-0101DiGrazia, J., McKelvey, K., Bollen, J., & Rojas, F. (2013). More Tweets, More Votes: Social Media as a Quantitative Indicator of Political Behavior. PLoS ONE, 8(11), e79449. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0079449Felt, M. (2016). Social media and the social sciences: How researchers employ Big Data analytics. Big Data & Society, 3(1), 205395171664582. doi:10.1177/2053951716645828Filer, T., & Fredheim, R. (2016). Popular with the Robots: Accusation and Automation in the Argentine Presidential Elections, 2015. International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, 30(3), 259-274. doi:10.1007/s10767-016-9233-7Freelon, D., & Karpf, D. (2014). Of big birds and bayonets: hybrid Twitter interactivity in the 2012 Presidential debates. Information, Communication & Society, 18(4), 390-406. doi:10.1080/1369118x.2014.952659Giglietto, F., & Selva, D. (2014). Second Screen and Participation: A Content Analysis on a Full Season Dataset of Tweets. Journal of Communication, 64(2), 260-277. doi:10.1111/jcom.12085Gil de Zúñiga, H., Garcia-Perdomo, V., & McGregor, S. C. (2015). What Is Second Screening? Exploring Motivations of Second Screen Use and Its Effect on Online Political Participation. Journal of Communication, 65(5), 793-815. doi:10.1111/jcom.12174Grover, P., Kar, A. K., Dwivedi, Y. K., & Janssen, M. (2019). Polarization and acculturation in US Election 2016 outcomes – Can twitter analytics predict changes in voting preferences. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 145, 438-460. doi:10.1016/j.techfore.2018.09.009Jensen, K. B. (2013). Definitive and Sensitizing Conceptualizations of Mediatization. Communication Theory, 23(3), 203-222. doi:10.1111/comt.12014Jungherr, A. (2014). The Logic of Political Coverage on Twitter: Temporal Dynamics and Content. Journal of Communication, 64(2), 239-259. doi:10.1111/jcom.12087Kalsnes, B., Krumsvik, A. H., & Storsul, T. (2014). Social media as a political backchannel. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 66(3), 313-328. doi:10.1108/ajim-09-2013-0093Lee, K., Palsetia, D., Narayanan, R., Patwary, M. M. A., Agrawal, A., & Choudhary, A. (2011). Twitter Trending Topic Classification. 2011 IEEE 11th International Conference on Data Mining Workshops. doi:10.1109/icdmw.2011.171López García, G., Llorca Abad, G., Valera Ordaz, L., & Peris Blanes, A. (2018). Los debates electorales, ¿el último reducto frente la mediatización? Un estudio de caso de las elecciones generales españolas de 2015. Palabra Clave - Revista de Comunicación, 21(3), 772-797. doi:10.5294/pacla.2018.21.3.6López-Rico, C.-M., & Peris-Blanes, À. (2017). Agenda e imagen de los candidatos de las elecciones generales de 2015 en España en programas televisivos de infoentretenimiento. El Profesional de la Información, 26(4), 611. doi:10.3145/epi.2017.jul.05MAZZOLENI, G., & SCHULZ, W. (1999). «Mediatization» of Politics: A Challenge for Democracy? Political Communication, 16(3), 247-261. doi:10.1080/105846099198613Murthy, D. (2015). Twitter and elections: are tweets, predictive, reactive, or a form of buzz? 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    Political polarization of news media and influencers on Twitter in the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections

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    Social media has been transforming political communication dynamics for over a decade. Here using nearly a billion tweets, we analyse the change in Twitter’s news media landscape between the 2016 and 2020 US presidential elections. Using political bias and fact-checking tools, we measure the volume of politically biased content and the number of users propagating such information. We then identify influencers—users with the greatest ability to spread news in the Twitter network. We observe that the fraction of fake and extremely biased content declined between 2016 and 2020. However, results show increasing echo chamber behaviours and latent ideological polarization across the two elections at the user and influencer levels

    Modern Survey Estimation with Social Media and Auxiliary Data

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    Traditional survey methods have been successful for nearly a century, but recently response rates have been declining and costs have been increasing, making the future of survey science uncertain. At the same time, new media sources are generating new forms of data, population data is increasingly readily available, and sophisticated machine learning algorithms are being created. This dissertation uses modern data sources and tools to improve survey estimates and advance the field of survey science. We begin by exploring the challenges of using data from new media, demonstrating how relationships between social media data and survey responses can appear deceptively strong. We examine a previously observed relationship between sentiment of ``jobs" tweets and consumer confidence, performing a sensitivity analysis on how sentiment of tweets is calculated and sorting ``jobs" tweets into categories based on their content, concluding that the original observed relationship was merely a chance occurrence. Next we track the relationship between sentiment of ``Trump" tweets and presidential approval. We develop a framework to interpret the strength of this observed relationship by implementing placebo analyses, in which we perform the same analysis but with tweets assumed to be unrelated to presidential approval, concluding that our observed relationship is not strong. Failing to find a meaningful signal, we next propose following a set of users over time. For a set of politically active users, we are able to find evidence of a political signal in terms of frequency and sentiment of their tweets around the 2016 presidential election. In a given corpus of tweets, there are likely to be several topics present, which has the potential to introduce bias when using the corpus to track survey responses. To help discover and sort tweets into these topics, we create a clustering-based topic modeling algorithm. Using the entire corpus, we create distances between words based on how often they appear together in the same tweet, create distances between tweets based on the distance between words in the tweets, and perform clustering on the resulting distances. We show that this method is effective using a validation set of tweets and apply it to the corpus of tweets from politically active users and ``jobs" tweets. Finally, we use population auxiliary data and machine learning algorithms to improve survey estimates. We develop an imputation-based estimation method that produces an unbiased estimate of the mean response of a finite population from a simple random sample when population auxiliary data are available. Our method allows for any prediction function or machine learning algorithm to be used to predict the response for out-of-sample observations, and is therefore able to accommodate a high dimensional setting and all covariate types. Exact unbiasedness is guaranteed by estimating the bias of the prediction function using subsamples of the original simple random sample. Importantly, the unbiasedness property does not depend on the accuracy of the imputation method. We apply this estimation method to simulated data, college tuition data, and the American Community Survey.PHDStatisticsUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/163193/1/fergr_1.pd

    When Infodemic Meets Epidemic: a Systematic Literature Review

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    Epidemics and outbreaks present arduous challenges requiring both individual and communal efforts. Social media offer significant amounts of data that can be leveraged for bio-surveillance. They also provide a platform to quickly and efficiently reach a sizeable percentage of the population, hence their potential impact on various aspects of epidemic mitigation. The general objective of this systematic literature review is to provide a methodical overview of the integration of social media in different epidemic-related contexts. Three research questions were conceptualized for this review, resulting in over 10000 publications collected in the first PRISMA stage, 129 of which were selected for inclusion. A thematic method-oriented synthesis was undertaken and identified 5 main themes related to social media enabled epidemic surveillance, misinformation management, and mental health. Findings uncover a need for more robust applications of the lessons learned from epidemic post-mortem documentation. A vast gap exists between retrospective analysis of epidemic management and result integration in prospective studies. Harnessing the full potential of social media in epidemic related tasks requires streamlining the results of epidemic forecasting, public opinion understanding and misinformation propagation, all while keeping abreast of potential mental health implications. Pro-active prevention has thus become vital for epidemic curtailment and containment
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