Tracing the trends in sustainability and social media research using topic modeling

New ideas are often born from connecting the dots. What new ideas have emerged among the two highly trending research topics of sustainability and social media? In this study, we present an empirical analysis of 762 published works that included the terms “sustainability” and “social media” in their abstracts. The bibliographic data, including abstracts, were collected from the Scopus database. In order to conduct the analysis, we used the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), an unsupervised machine learning algorithm to extract the latent topics from the large quantity of research abstracts without any manual adjustment. The 10 main topics identified from our analysis revealed topographical maps of research in the field. By measuring the variation of topic distributions over time, we identified hot topics (research trends that are becoming increasingly popular over time) and cold topics. Sustainable consumer behavior, Sustainable community and Sustainable tourism were identified as being hot topics, while Education for sustainability was identified as the only cold topic. By identifying current trends in social media and sustainability research, our findings lay a platform from which further studies may abound

State of the art 2015: a literature review of social media intelligence capabilities for counter-terrorism

Overview This paper is a review of how information and insight can be drawn from open social media sources. It focuses on the specific research techniques that have emerged, the capabilities they provide, the possible insights they offer, and the ethical and legal questions they raise. These techniques are considered relevant and valuable in so far as they can help to maintain public safety by preventing terrorism, preparing for it, protecting the public from it and pursuing its perpetrators. The report also considers how far this can be achieved against the backdrop of radically changing technology and public attitudes towards surveillance. This is an updated version of a 2013 report paper on the same subject, State of the Art. Since 2013, there have been significant changes in social media, how it is used by terrorist groups, and the methods being developed to make sense of it.  The paper is structured as follows: Part 1 is an overview of social media use, focused on how it is used by groups of interest to those involved in counter-terrorism. This includes new sections on trends of social media platforms; and a new section on Islamic State (IS). Part 2 provides an introduction to the key approaches of social media intelligence (henceforth ‘SOCMINT’) for counter-terrorism. Part 3 sets out a series of SOCMINT techniques. For each technique a series of capabilities and insights are considered, the validity and reliability of the method is considered, and how they might be applied to counter-terrorism work explored. Part 4 outlines a number of important legal, ethical and practical considerations when undertaking SOCMINT work