30,726 research outputs found
Using mixed methods to track the growth of the Web: tracing open government data initiatives
In recent years, there have been a rising number of Open Government Data (OGD) initiatives; a political, social and technical movement armed with a common goal of publishing government data in open, re-usable formats in order to improve citizen-to-government transparency, efficiency, and democracy. As a sign of commitment, the Open Government Partnership was formed, comprising of a collection of countries striving to achieve OGD. Since its initial launch, the number of countries committed to adopting an Open Government Data agenda has grown to more than 50; including countries from South America to the Far East.Current approaches to understanding Web initiatives such as OGD are still being developed. Methodologies grounded in multidisciplinarity are still yet to be achieved; typically research follows a social or technological approach underpinned by quantitative or qualitative methods, and rarely combining the two into a single analytical framework. In this paper, a mixed methods approach will be introduced, which uses qualitative data underpinned by sociological theory to complement a quantitative analysis using computer science techniques. This method aims to provide an alternative approach to understanding the socio-technical activities of the Web. To demonstrate this, the activities of the UK Open Government Data initiative will be explored using a range of quantitative and qualitative data, examining the activities of the community, to provide a rich analysis of the formation and development of the UK OGD community
On the Role of Social Identity and Cohesion in Characterizing Online Social Communities
Two prevailing theories for explaining social group or community structure
are cohesion and identity. The social cohesion approach posits that social
groups arise out of an aggregation of individuals that have mutual
interpersonal attraction as they share common characteristics. These
characteristics can range from common interests to kinship ties and from social
values to ethnic backgrounds. In contrast, the social identity approach posits
that an individual is likely to join a group based on an intrinsic
self-evaluation at a cognitive or perceptual level. In other words group
members typically share an awareness of a common category membership.
In this work we seek to understand the role of these two contrasting theories
in explaining the behavior and stability of social communities in Twitter. A
specific focal point of our work is to understand the role of these theories in
disparate contexts ranging from disaster response to socio-political activism.
We extract social identity and social cohesion features-of-interest for large
scale datasets of five real-world events and examine the effectiveness of such
features in capturing behavioral characteristics and the stability of groups.
We also propose a novel measure of social group sustainability based on the
divergence in group discussion. Our main findings are: 1) Sharing of social
identities (especially physical location) among group members has a positive
impact on group sustainability, 2) Structural cohesion (represented by high
group density and low average shortest path length) is a strong indicator of
group sustainability, and 3) Event characteristics play a role in shaping group
sustainability, as social groups in transient events behave differently from
groups in events that last longer
Dynamics in online social networks
An increasing number of today's social interactions occurs using online
social media as communication channels. Some online social networks have become
extremely popular in the last decade. They differ among themselves in the
character of the service they provide to online users. For instance, Facebook
can be seen mainly as a platform for keeping in touch with close friends and
relatives, Twitter is used to propagate and receive news, LinkedIn facilitates
the maintenance of professional contacts, Flickr gathers amateurs and
professionals of photography, etc. Albeit different, all these online platforms
share an ingredient that pervades all their applications. There exists an
underlying social network that allows their users to keep in touch with each
other and helps to engage them in common activities or interactions leading to
a better fulfillment of the service's purposes. This is the reason why these
platforms share a good number of functionalities, e.g., personal communication
channels, broadcasted status updates, easy one-step information sharing, news
feeds exposing broadcasted content, etc. As a result, online social networks
are an interesting field to study an online social behavior that seems to be
generic among the different online services. Since at the bottom of these
services lays a network of declared relations and the basic interactions in
these platforms tend to be pairwise, a natural methodology for studying these
systems is provided by network science. In this chapter we describe some of the
results of research studies on the structure, dynamics and social activity in
online social networks. We present them in the interdisciplinary context of
network science, sociological studies and computer science.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures, book chapte
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