Beautiful and damned. Combined effect of content quality and social ties on user engagement

User participation in online communities is driven by the intertwinement of the social network structure with the crowd-generated content that flows along its links. These aspects are rarely explored jointly and at scale. By looking at how users generate and access pictures of varying beauty on Flickr, we investigate how the production of quality impacts the dynamics of online social systems. We develop a deep learning computer vision model to score images according to their aesthetic value and we validate its output through crowdsourcing. By applying it to over 15B Flickr photos, we study for the first time how image beauty is distributed over a large-scale social system. Beautiful images are evenly distributed in the network, although only a small core of people get social recognition for them. To study the impact of exposure to quality on user engagement, we set up matching experiments aimed at detecting causality from observational data. Exposure to beauty is double-edged: following people who produce high-quality content increases one's probability of uploading better photos; however, an excessive imbalance between the quality generated by a user and the user's neighbors leads to a decline in engagement. Our analysis has practical implications for improving link recommender systems.Comment: 13 pages, 12 figures, final version published in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (Volume: PP, Issue: 99

Elites, communities and the limited benefits of mentorship in electronic music

While the emergence of success in creative professions, such as music, has been studied extensively, the link between individual success and collaboration is not yet fully uncovered. Here we aim to fill this gap by analyzing longitudinal data on the co-releasing and mentoring patterns of popular electronic music artists appearing in the annual Top 100 ranking of DJ Magazine. We find that while this ranking list of popularity publishes 100 names, only the top 20 is stable over time, showcasing a lock-in effect on the electronic music elite. Based on the temporal co-release network of top musicians, we extract a diverse community structure characterizing the electronic music industry. These groups of artists are temporally segregated, sequentially formed around leading musicians, and represent changes in musical genres. We show that a major driving force behind the formation of music communities is mentorship: around half of musicians entering the top 100 have been mentored by current leading figures before they entered the list. We also find that mentees are unlikely to break into the top 20, yet have much higher expected best ranks than those who were not mentored. This implies that mentorship helps rising talents, but becoming an all-time star requires more. Our results provide insights into the intertwined roles of success and collaboration in electronic music, highlighting the mechanisms shaping the formation and landscape of artistic elites in electronic music

From BookTok to Bookshelf: Algorithms and Book Recommendations on TikTok

TikTok, a social media platform focused on short-form videos, is gaining a reputation for renewing interest in books (Bateman 2022; Harris 2021). While reviewing and recommending books is not new, the ability to do so on a large scale used to be limited to a select group of critics. Social media allows readers to voice their opinions, and by gaining followings these readers can then influence at a similar scale as traditional reviewers. This raises various questions as to how culture is created and curated. Today, this curation is done largely by algorithms through recommending and promoting content. The rise of BookTok emphasizes this, combining recommendations with TikTok’s algorithm to boost the popularity of certain books. In particular, BookTok has made headlines by repeatedly raising backlist books back onto the bestseller lists. This increases the shift from traditional curators of culture to a community of fellow readers, which can in turn popularize specific genres. Thus, the main question this thesis aims to answer is: what distinguishes BookTok from other digital platforms, enabling it to have such a cultural impact going beyond the online book community? The BookTok phenomenon will be explained by using a mixed-method approach looking at how creators use platform affordances, aesthetic features, and their algorithmic imaginaries to appeal to both users and the TikTok algorithm. The data used in this thesis consists of 148 BookTok videos gathered over a two-week period from the “For You” page. A content analysis was conducted to find patterns in the construction of the videos, the use of specific aesthetic features, and the selection of recommended book titles. Based on this data, it was possible to detect and describe different genres of BookTok videos and to identify the use of relevant platform affordances. This was complemented by a thematic analysis of interviews with three video creators, selected from the authors of the material in the dataset. The interviews gave insight into the algorithmic imaginary of the creators and how the construction of the algorithm informs the creative process. The analysis showed that while the algorithm is what makes the recommendations popular by distributing them to a receptive audience, the TikTok format is what makes the recommendations memorable and has a positive impact on book sales. As the algorithm informs every aspect of the book recommendations, from the creator’s decisions of picking a certain book to the decisions on when to make the video and who the algorithm subsequently recommends the video to, the book recommendations on BookTok can be examined as examples of algorithmic curation. By taking up the topic of literature and literary readership from a digital culture perspective, this thesis aims to contribute to the greater discussions on algorithms, personalization, and its’ effect on cultural production and curation.Master's Thesis in Digital CultureDIKULT350MAHF-DIKU

“It’s cool to feel sad”: A thematic analysis of the social media experiences of university students who have self-harmed

Background: Suicide and self-harm rates amongst young people have been identified as a public mental health concern with emerging links to social media use. Aim: The current study aimed to qualitatively explore the social media experiences of university students who have self-harmed, as they have been identified as a group vulnerable to suicide. Method: Semi-structured interviews were completed at two time points with students aged 21 and under who have self-harmed whilst at university, with transcripts of interviews analysed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2021). Results: Three organising themes were identified: 1) Instagram vs reality, 2) A double-edged sword, 3) Curating online spaces. The analysis provided a developmental overview of patterns across students’ experiences online, identifying negative social comparisons, the romanticisation of mental illness, and the development of their insight and rules to engage with social media in a helpful way. Conclusions: The study provided an insight into the evolution of the online lives of students who have self-harmed, highlighting key modifiable risk factors that researchers, policymakers and clinicians could meaningfully target to promote ‘digital hygiene’ and the reduction of potential harm from social media

Taking Her at Her Work: Reconsidering the Legacy of Alma Mahler

Alma Mahler (1879–1964) grew up surrounded by artists in late nineteenth-century Vienna. Despite her musical training, demonstrated passion for music, and publication of several Lieder, Mahler’s identity as a composer has remained overshadowed by narratives surrounding her personal life and those of her husbands and lovers, not to mention the artistic work of her husbands and lovers. Increasingly, however, interest in Alma Mahler as a composer has been nurtured through creative engagement with that legacy, and frequently by women authors and artists. This dissertation explores the existing literature written by and related to Alma Mahler and identifies some approaches for reevaluating her legacy as a composer. Those writing about the life and legacy of Alma Mahler in the twenty-first century typically follow one of two established paths; that of the rational author writing the irrational female subject or that of creative, and frequently feminist, approaches to Mahler’s life and work. I propose a third path, one that acknowledges both of the aforementioned approaches, but that focuses on Mahler’s work instead of her words. By drawing attention to Mahler works—that is, her songs and the performance thereof—and considering how reception and recording of these songs has shifted over the past several decades, I am poised to assert that Mahler is a composer. The proliferation of diverging primary source materials surrounding her life and musical activities has prompted some to discount the narrative of Alma Mahler as a legitimate composer. This dissertation acknowledges the varied and often conflicting approaches to and perspectives on the idea of Alma Mahler as a composer and vi investigates how her music and its performance have been received in light of, and sometimes despite, her own writings. My work reconciles diverse facets of the composer by exploring her own words, the words of others, and, perhaps most importantly, her musical work in contemporary performance. It is my contention that by investigating Mahler through all of these frames, we can identify and contextualize the hidden but significant musical contributions of a young, female song composer in turn-of-the-century Vienna

Taking Her at Her Work: Reconsidering the Legacy of Alma Mahler

Taking Her at Her Work: Reconsidering the Legacy of Alma Mahle

Expanding communities of sustainable practice: 15 October 2016: symposium proceedings

During this one-day symposium, we focused on the importance of collaboration and networks in creating art and design practices that contribute to eco-social sustainability. We were especially interested in complicating as well as expanding the notions of sustainability within art and design education and how they contribute to engaging the public in sustainable and progressively transformative eco-social practices. We are convinced that sustainability is also about meshing up and intersecting practice and theory, thus the day encompassed theoretical and practical engagements with sustainability – always with a focus on making this day productive in terms of building alliances, projects and shared commitments between the people attending

Nervousness in the works of F Scott Fitzgerald

This study examines how nervousness and the ideas that came to be associated with it manifest themselves in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, often influencing both the characters and themes in his fiction; Chapter one traces the development of what is referred to as a nervous discourse from the eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, revealing how the pre-Enlightenment sense of nervous, which signified strength, gradually gave way to a meaning which indicates agitation or timidity and implies a sense of weakness. In addition, this chapter demonstrates that nervousness, even within medical literature, became linked to a number of other cultural ideas, particularly modernity, social status, gender, and sensibility; Chapter two examines how the ideas connected with nervousness can be seen in Fitzgerald\u27s early work and This Side of Paradise, particularly in his treatment of nervous mothers, restless children, and enervation. Chapter three demonstrates that dissipation and hysteria became connected with nervous discourse, and that these ideas are contrasted with efficiency in The Beautiful and Damned and several of Fitzgerald\u27s other stories from this period. Chapter four discusses the nervous men who fall in love with nervous women in The Great Gatsby and other fiction Fitzgerald published from 1922 to 1927, which reveals that nervousness had a different significance for characters of different genders. Chapter five demonstrates how the theme of vitality which runs through the Basil and Josephine stories, Tender is the Night, and The Crack-Up essays is associated with the nervous system, and that Fitzgerald conceived of his artistic and emotional crisis in the 1930s as a type of nervous bankruptcy, while it also examines how the theme of degeneration emerges during this period of Fitzgerald\u27s career. And chapter six concludes the study by revealing that some of Fitzgerald\u27s ideas regarding nervousness began to change in the final years of his life, as can be seen in The Love of the Last Tycoon, and that after Fitzgerald\u27s death, the age of anxiety came to displace Fitzgerald\u27s nervous era