"Narco" Emotions: Affect and Desensitization in Social Media during the Mexican Drug War

Social media platforms have emerged as prominent information sharing ecosystems in the context of a variety of recent crises, ranging from mass emergencies, to wars and political conflicts. We study affective responses in social media and how they might indicate desensitization to violence experienced in communities embroiled in an armed conflict. Specifically, we examine three established affect measures: negative affect, activation, and dominance as observed on Twitter in relation to a number of statistics on protracted violence in four major cities afflicted by the Mexican Drug War. During a two year period (Aug 2010-Dec 2012), while violence was on the rise in these regions, our findings show a decline in negative emotional expression as well as a rise in emotional arousal and dominance in Twitter posts: aspects known to be psychological markers of desensitization. We discuss the implications of our work for behavioral health, facilitating rehabilitation efforts in communities enmeshed in an acute and persistent urban warfare, and the impact on civic engagement.Comment: Best paper award at the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems (CHI '14). ACM, New York, NY, USA, pages 3563-357

Participatory Design for the Social Media Needs of Emergency Public Information Officers

ABSTRACT This paper describes the design, execution, and results of a participatory design workshop with emergency public information officers (PIOs). During the workshop, PIOs and researchers explored ideas and designs for supporting the social media needs of PIO work. Results indicate that PIO perceptions of social media have changed as they have learned to incorporate activities of the public into their work, yet they still struggle with issues of trust and liability. Based on workshop design activities, the paper offers a set of design recommendations for supporting the social media needs of PIO work practice such as the ability to monitor, document, and report social media activity

Ceremonial Storytelling

US society has controversially debated civil-military relationships and war trauma since the Vietnam War. Civic activists today promote Indigenous warrior traditions as role models for non-Native veteran reintegration and health care. They particularly stress the role of ritual and narrative for civil-military negotiations of war experience and for trauma therapy. Applying a cultural-comparative lens, this book reads non-Native soldiers’ and veterans’ life writing from post-9/11 wars as «ceremonial storytelling.» It analyzes activist academic texts, «milblogs» written in the war zone, as well as «homecoming scenarios.» Soldiers’ and veterans’ interactions with civilians constitute jointly constructed, narrative civic rituals that discuss the meaning of war experience and homecoming

Detecting, Modeling, and Predicting User Temporal Intention

The content of social media has grown exponentially in the recent years and its role has evolved from narrating life events to actually shaping them. Unfortunately, content posted and shared in social networks is vulnerable and prone to loss or change, rendering the context associated with it (a tweet, post, status, or others) meaningless. There is an inherent value in maintaining the consistency of such social records as in some cases they take over the task of being the first draft of history as collections of these social posts narrate the pulse of the street during historic events, protest, riots, elections, war, disasters, and others as shown in this work. The user sharing the resource has an implicit temporal intent: either the state of the resource at the time of sharing, or the current state of the resource at the time of the reader \clicking . In this research, we propose a model to detect and predict the user\u27s temporal intention of the author upon sharing content in the social network and of the reader upon resolving this content. To build this model, we first examine the three aspects of the problem: the resource, time, and the user. For the resource we start by analyzing the content on the live web and its persistence. We noticed that a portion of the resources shared in social media disappear, and with further analysis we unraveled a relationship between this disappearance and time. We lose around 11% of the resources after one year of sharing and a steady 7% every following year. With this, we turn to the public archives and our analysis reveals that not all posted resources are archived and even they were an average 8% per year disappears from the archives and in some cases the archived content is heavily damaged. These observations prove that in regards to archives resources are not well-enough populated to consistently and reliably reconstruct the missing resource as it existed at the time of sharing. To analyze the concept of time we devised several experiments to estimate the creation date of the shared resources. We developed Carbon Date, a tool which successfully estimated the correct creation dates for 76% of the test sets. Since the resources\u27 creation we wanted to measure if and how they change with time. We conducted a longitudinal study on a data set of very recently-published tweet-resource pairs and recording observations hourly. We found that after just one hour, ~4% of the resources have changed by ≥30% while after a day the change rate slowed to be ~12% of the resources changed by ≥40%. In regards to the third and final component of the problem we conducted user behavioral analysis experiments and built a data set of 1,124 instances manually assigned by test subjects. Temporal intention proved to be a difficult concept for average users to understand. We developed our Temporal Intention Relevancy Model (TIRM) to transform the highly subjective temporal intention problem into the more easily understood idea of relevancy between a tweet and the resource it links to, and change of the resource through time. On our collected data set TIRM produced a significant 90.27% success rate. Furthermore, we extended TIRM and used it to build a time-based model to predict temporal intention change or steadiness at the time of posting with 77% accuracy. We built a service API around this model to provide predictions and a few prototypes. Future tools could implement TIRM to assist users in pushing copies of shared resources into public web archives to ensure the integrity of the historical record. Additional tools could be used to assist the mining of the existing social media corpus by derefrencing the intended version of the shared resource based on the intention strength and the time between the tweeting and mining

Blogs as Infrastructure for Scholarly Communication.

This project systematically analyzes digital humanities blogs as an infrastructure for scholarly communication. This exploratory research maps the discourses of a scholarly community to understand the infrastructural dynamics of blogs and the Open Web. The text contents of 106,804 individual blog posts from a corpus of 396 blogs were analyzed using a mix of computational and qualitative methods. Analysis uses an experimental methodology (trace ethnography) combined with unsupervised machine learning (topic modeling), to perform an interpretive analysis at scale. Methodological findings show topic modeling can be integrated with qualitative and interpretive analysis. Special attention must be paid to data fitness, or the shape and re-shaping practices involved with preparing data for machine learning algorithms. Quantitative analysis of computationally generated topics indicates that while the community writes about diverse subject matter, individual scholars focus their attention on only a couple of topics. Four categories of informal scholarly communication emerged from the qualitative analysis: quasi-academic, para-academic, meta-academic, and extra-academic. The quasi and para-academic categories represent discourse with scholarly value within the digital humanities community, but do not necessarily have an obvious path into formal publication and preservation. A conceptual model, the (in)visible college, is introduced for situating scholarly communication on blogs and the Open Web. An (in)visible college is a kind of scholarly communication that is informal, yet visible at scale. This combination of factors opens up a new space for the study of scholarly communities and communication. While (in)invisible colleges are programmatically observable, care must be taken with any effort to count and measure knowledge work in these spaces. This is the first systematic, data driven analysis of the digital humanities and lays the groundwork for subsequent social studies of digital humanities.PhDInformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/111592/1/mcburton_1.pd

“Tutteli to Japan”: A case study of spontaneous collaboration in disaster response

“Tutteli to Japan” (TTJ) is a case study of ordinary people, a group of Japanese women living in Finland, trying to figure out how to help disaster-affected citizens from a distance in coordination with likeminded strangers on-the-ground to accomplish aid supply delivery. Unlike commonly seen in citizen response to disasters, this case did not start as an extension of pre-existing social group activities or an informal group of volunteers under the name of TTJ. Rather, the effort emerged from individual responses on the Internet to the 2011 Great Tohoku Earthquake and Tsunami disasters in Japan, expressing their compassions and aspirations to do something for the disaster victims; some were on Twitter, some were on their blogs. As the devastation escalated, so did the people’s eagerness to do something about the inadequate distribution of resources, with a focus on the breastfeeding mothers in Japan who only had access to powder-based baby formula. Having this challenge left untouched by government or aid agencies, these concerned individuals, as novice learners of international aid work without a chain of command, continued seeking and sharing information in order to deliver the liquid baby formula regardless of informational, operational, and situational uncertainties surrounding them. Within the next forty days, these volunteer individuals were able to ship six times, a total of 12,000 cartons of formula, directly delivered and distributed to the hands of breastfeeding mothers in twelve different locations in the disaster-affected communities in Japan. In this dissertation, I study the entangled, mutually collaborative nature of finding a way to help processes within and between like-minded individuals and the broader context of people and information with emphasis on information needs and learning. Drawing on a dataset that encompasses a range of real-time social media data as well as interviews and documentation, this single-case study traces how ordinary citizens interacting online develop the idea for delivery of baby formula as emergency supplies and how these like-minded strangers collaboratively mobilized resources for the TTJ logistics and processes of packaging, dispatching and delivering large volumes of relief supply including: the fundraising volunteers in Finland, the drivers and distributors in Japan. This study aims to describe how such ordinary people’s information interactions shape spontaneous collaboration in disaster response. My findings suggest that independent public participation and collaborative efforts for disaster response perform as sources of tensions and various kinds of vagueness, but these are the functions that spontaneous volunteers can offer resourcefully. With learning by doing approaches, these compassionate individuals, both online and on-the-ground, muddled through unknown needs of unfamiliar activities in identifying, managing and processing different kinds of tasks, particularly by asking for information and acting on information received including uses of vague language and uncertain sources of information. This iteration of dual processes – searching for information to help and self-organizing under leaderless management – illuminates underlying processes of spontaneous collaboration. I argue that the TTJ illustrates the power of intention, which is the power of creativity among ordinary people acting on information processed through humane-driven technology use. These iterative information interactions can be best understood through a new concept articulated in this dissertation, shared uncertainty. This concept encompasses our understanding of independent public participation and collaboration and offers an interdisciplinary bridge between research in information behavior, computer-supported cooperative work, crisis informatics and disaster studies

Transatlantic Black Lives Matter: Motivations for Participation and Non-Participation in Black Lives Matter Beyond the USA

Social movements have long since been a staple in civic life with each new generation presenting new tactics and means for engagement. The introduction of Black Lives Matter in 2014 brought racial disparities at the hands of law enforcement in the US to the attention of thousands of people around the world through their use of social media and their protests which were heavily followed around the world. Whilst studies have looked into how the movement’s usage of social media has been pivotal to their growth,and how it has encouraged political participation in a new generation, researchers are yet to delve into the mechanics of the movement and how this is received on a larger scale. Furthermore, how those who have different lived experiences contextualise their support or disagreement of the movement given their difference in cultural context and history of racial tension.This study looks to explore the perception of a globally recognised movement outside of its home, the USA, by taking into consideration where the advocacy is happening and how/why people participate on different levels. This perspective is key in beginning to understand how individuals arrive at various conclusions,and how that journey towards arriving at their conclusions have been influenced along the way. The results of this research project were gathered through the use of a quantative and qualitative survey of 383 people from countries outside of the US, mainly Europe and the UK. The results found that the majority of respondents questioned whether Black Lives Matter as it stands,was relevant in their country, with many calling for a more inclusive movement and therefore, messaging, that extends to other minorities that are thought to receive the same level of injustice (if not more so) than black people with an emphasis on minorities such as Arabs, Gypsies, Jews, Muslims and Turks. The findings from this research create opportunities for future researchers to explore how movements embed their cause and messaging in countries that have different cultural and historical context in order to gain allies/sympathisers, how different information sources influence how people add context to their beliefs and how the decentralised nature of the movement has had an impact on the way they are received