Measuring internet activity: a (selective) review of methods and metrics

Two Decades after the birth of the World Wide Web, more than two billion people around the world are Internet users. The digital landscape is littered with hints that the affordances of digital communications are being leveraged to transform life in profound and important ways. The reach and influence of digitally mediated activity grow by the day and touch upon all aspects of life, from health, education, and commerce to religion and governance. This trend demands that we seek answers to the biggest questions about how digitally mediated communication changes society and the role of different policies in helping or hindering the beneficial aspects of these changes. Yet despite the profusion of data the digital age has brought upon us—we now have access to a flood of information about the movements, relationships, purchasing decisions, interests, and intimate thoughts of people around the world—the distance between the great questions of the digital age and our understanding of the impact of digital communications on society remains large. A number of ongoing policy questions have emerged that beg for better empirical data and analyses upon which to base wider and more insightful perspectives on the mechanics of social, economic, and political life online. This paper seeks to describe the conceptual and practical impediments to measuring and understanding digital activity and highlights a sample of the many efforts to fill the gap between our incomplete understanding of digital life and the formidable policy questions related to developing a vibrant and healthy Internet that serves the public interest and contributes to human wellbeing. Our primary focus is on efforts to measure Internet activity, as we believe obtaining robust, accurate data is a necessary and valuable first step that will lead us closer to answering the vitally important questions of the digital realm. Even this step is challenging: the Internet is difficult to measure and monitor, and there is no simple aggregate measure of Internet activity—no GDP, no HDI. In the following section we present a framework for assessing efforts to document digital activity. The next three sections offer a summary and description of many of the ongoing projects that document digital activity, with two final sections devoted to discussion and conclusions

Exploiting Open Data to analyze discussion and controversy in online citizen participation

In this paper we propose a computational approach that applies data mining techniques to analyze the citizen participation recorded in an online digital platform. Differently to previous work, the approach exploits external knowledge extracted from Open Government Data for processing the citizens’ proposals and debates of the platform, enabling to characterize targeted issues and problems, and analyze the levels of discussion, sup-port and controversy raised by the proposals. As a result of our analysis, we derive a number of insights and conclusions of interest and value for both citizens and government stakeholders in decision and policy making tasks. Among others, we show that proposals targeting issues that affect large majorities tend to be supported by citizens and ultimately implemented by the city council, but leave aside other very important issues affecting minority groups. Our study reveals that most controversial, likely relevant, problems do not always receive sufficient attention in e-participation. Moreover, it identifies several types of controversy, related to ideological and socioeconomic factors and political attitude

The shape of eParticipation: Characterizing an emerging research area

The phenomenon of eParticipation is receiving increasing attention, demonstrated by recent technology implementations, experiments, government reports, and research programs. Understanding such an emerging field is a complex endeavor because there is no generally agreed upon definition of the field, no clear overview of the research disciplines or methods it draws upon, and because the boundaries of the field are undecided. Using conventional literature review techniques, we identify 131 scientific articles considered important for the field's theoretical development. This sample provides the starting point for a grounded analysis leading to the development of an overview model: the field of eParticipation seen from a researcher's perspective. The model provides structure for understanding the emerging shape of the field as well as an initial indication of its content. It also provides the basis for developing research agendas for the future

The use of social media in EU policy communication and implications for the emergence of a European public sphere

Cohesion policy is the European Union’s (EU) main investment policy and seeks to strengthen economic, social and territorial cohesion. While accomplishments in this regard are constantly measured, European citizens are not always aware of the policy’s impact and the role the EU plays therein. This is especially relevant as the communication of EU policies is central to the emergence of a European public sphere, an acknowledged condition for European integration. In this paper, we aim at advancing research in this regard through the analysis of cohesion policy communication on the social media channels of ten Local Managing Authorities (LMAs) responsible for managing and communicating structural funds at the local level. By building on a bottom-up construction of shared meaning structures through semi-automatic analysis techniques, we make the following three observations: first, social media communication is indicative of "horizontal Europeanization"; second, Europeanization occurs both in the form of the spontaneous amalgamation of shared discontent expressed by citizens and the institutionalization of top-down EU communication measures adopted by LMAs; and third, a cluster of topics articulated internationally and showcasing a negative attitude towards the EU funding scheme suggests that, counter-intuitively, Euroscepticism seems to facilitate the emergence of a European public sphere

Europe in the shadow of financial crisis: Policy Making via Stance Classification

Since 2009, the European Union (EU) is phasing a multi–year financial crisis affecting the stability of its involved countries. Our goal is to gain useful insights on the societal impact of such a strong political issue through the exploitation of topic modeling and stance classification techniques. \ \ To perform this, we unravel public’s stance towards this event and empower citizens’ participation in the decision making process, taking policy’s life cycle as a baseline. The paper introduces and evaluates a bilingual stance classification architecture, enabling a deeper understanding of how citizens’ sentiment polarity changes based on the critical political decisions taken among European countries. \ \ Through three novel empirical studies, we aim to explore and answer whether stance classification can be used to: i) determine citizens’ sentiment polarity for a series of political events by observing the diversity of opinion among European citizens, ii) predict political decisions outcome made by citizens such as a referendum call, ii) examine whether citizens’ sentiments agree with governmental decisions during each stage of a policy life cycle.

Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse

The goal of argumentation mining, an evolving research field in computational linguistics, is to design methods capable of analyzing people's argumentation. In this article, we go beyond the state of the art in several ways. (i) We deal with actual Web data and take up the challenges given by the variety of registers, multiple domains, and unrestricted noisy user-generated Web discourse. (ii) We bridge the gap between normative argumentation theories and argumentation phenomena encountered in actual data by adapting an argumentation model tested in an extensive annotation study. (iii) We create a new gold standard corpus (90k tokens in 340 documents) and experiment with several machine learning methods to identify argument components. We offer the data, source codes, and annotation guidelines to the community under free licenses. Our findings show that argumentation mining in user-generated Web discourse is a feasible but challenging task.Comment: Cite as: Habernal, I. & Gurevych, I. (2017). Argumentation Mining in User-Generated Web Discourse. Computational Linguistics 43(1), pp. 125-17

Preface: The Second Generation of Second Amendment Law & Policy

Over 70% of China’s domestic oil production is obtained from nine giant oilfields. Understanding the behaviour of these fields is essential to both domestic oil production and future Chinese oil imports. This study utilizes decline curves and depletion rate analysis to create some future production outlooks for the Chinese giants. Based on our study, we can only conclude that China’s future domestic oil production faces a significant challenge caused by maturing and declining giant fields. Evidence also indicates that the extensive use of water flooding and enhanced oil recovery methods may be masking increasing scarcity and may result in even steeper future decline rates than the ones currently being seen. Our results suggest that a considerable drop in oil production from the Chinese giants can be expected over the next decades

Debating Technology for Dialogical Argument:Sensemaking, Engagement and Analytics

Debating technologies, a newly emerging strand of research into computational technologies to support human debating, offer a powerful way of providing naturalistic, dialogue-based interaction with complex information spaces. The full potential of debating technologies for dialogical argument can, however, only be realized once key technical and engineering challenges are overcome, namely data structure, data availability, and interoperability between components. Our aim in this article is to show that the Argument Web, a vision for integrated, reusable, semantically rich resources connecting views, opinions, arguments, and debates online, offers a solution to these challenges. Through the use of a running example taken from the domain of citizen dialogue, we demonstrate for the first time that different Argument Web components focusing on sensemaking, engagement, and analytics can work in concert as a suite of debating technologies for rich, complex, dialogical argument

Platform Advocacy and the Threat to Deliberative Democracy

Businesses have long tried to influence political outcomes, but today, there is a new and potent form of corporate political power—Platform Advocacy. Internet-based platforms, such as Facebook, Google, and Uber, mobilize their user bases through direct solicitation of support and the more troubling exploitation of irrational behavior. Platform Advocacy helps platforms push policy agendas that create favorable legal environments for themselves, thereby strengthening their own dominance in the marketplace. This new form of advocacy will have radical effects on deliberative democracy. In the age of constant digital noise and uncertainty, it is more important than ever to detect and analyze new forms of political power. This Article will contribute to our understanding of one such new form and provide a way forward to ensure the exceptional power of platforms do not improperly influence consumers and, by extension, lawmakers