Real-Time Classification of Twitter Trends

Social media users give rise to social trends as they share about common interests, which can be triggered by different reasons. In this work, we explore the types of triggers that spark trends on Twitter, introducing a typology with following four types: 'news', 'ongoing events', 'memes', and 'commemoratives'. While previous research has analyzed trending topics in a long term, we look at the earliest tweets that produce a trend, with the aim of categorizing trends early on. This would allow to provide a filtered subset of trends to end users. We analyze and experiment with a set of straightforward language-independent features based on the social spread of trends to categorize them into the introduced typology. Our method provides an efficient way to accurately categorize trending topics without need of external data, enabling news organizations to discover breaking news in real-time, or to quickly identify viral memes that might enrich marketing decisions, among others. The analysis of social features also reveals patterns associated with each type of trend, such as tweets about ongoing events being shorter as many were likely sent from mobile devices, or memes having more retweets originating from a few trend-setters.Comment: Pre-print of article accepted for publication in Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology copyright @ 2013 (American Society for Information Science and Technology

Liturgical Traffic in Culture: Gridlock, Beginning Drivers, Detours, and DUI

(Excerpt) In the Sunday New York Times from March 16, 1997 a short piece with accompanying picture offered a report on a weekly liturgy at St. Mark\u27s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle, a liturgy which is very popular with young people. Entitled The Faithful Are Casual at This Sunday Service, the article concerns a forty-year tradition of doing sung compline in a space which is almost totally dark except for about fifteen male singers, bedecked in cassock and surplice, who stand dimly lighted at portable choir desks. Young people hurry to the 9:30p.m. service to sit in the pews, lie prone on their backs or in fetal position, some kissing each other, both those straight and those gay. Ushers carry calligraphic signs that urge silence and no whispering. It\u27s a kind of date night, attendees say, and it is well-liked because the service is not preachy but offers both anonymity and community. A former liturgist at the cathedral reflected that in our culture we do things regarding love and spirituality better by candlelight, at night

Collective Memory, Criminal Law, and the Trial of Derek Chauvin

This Note describes how criminal trials for prominent criminal acts contribute to the collective memory of the underlying offense. Hannah Arendt once argued that the purpose of criminal trials is to “render justice, and nothing else.” Unlike criminal trials, political trials strive to produce collective memory. This Note utilizes political trials as a foil to criminal trials to identify the ways that criminal trials succeed (and fail) to produce collective memory. Several features of the criminal trial— namely, the trial’s unique narrative form, constituent storytellers, capacity to capture the gravity of the offense, and jury—add to society’s shared narrative of the offense. By developing and utilizing a framework for how criminal trials manufacture collective memory, this Note considers how the trial of Derek Chauvin adds to the collective memory of George Floyd’s murder

Correcting the Conversation: An Argument for a Public Health Perspective Approach to University Timely Warnings about Sexual Assault

Reports of sexual violence should be written from a public health perspective approach to appropriately frame the occurrence and encourage accurate understandings of sexual assault as a larger societal issue. This research consists of two studies to investigate the way universities do (and should) communicate about sexual violence with their students. For Study 1, interviews were conducted with a random sample of public state Universities regarding their emergency alert processes and template usage to determine current emergency communication practices. The majority of universities contacted do not have a template or best practice guidelines in place for creating timely warnings. For Study 2, an experimental test asked participants to read a hypothetical university timely warning message about a sexual assault on campus and take a post-test survey about their perceptions of sexual assault and personal estimation of threat. The experiment tested whether the inclusion of contextualizing statistics and information in the message changed their reported perceptions of rape overall. Results from the study show that a combination approach incorporating both statistics and personal safety strategies had the greatest influence on both threat perception and reported preventative behaviors. This research has significant public policy implications for best practices concerning institutional communication about sexual assault

Generating Semantic Snapshots of Newscasts Using Entity Expansion

textabstractTV newscasts report about the latest event-related facts occurring in the world. Relying exclusively on them is, however, insufficient to fully grasp the context of the story being reported. In this paper, we propose an approach that retrieves and analyzes related documents from the Web to automatically generate semantic annotations that provide viewers and experts comprehensive information about the news. We detect named entities in the retrieved documents that further disclose relevant concepts that were not explicitly mentioned in the original newscast. A ranking algorithm based on entity frequency, popularity peak analysis, and domain experts’ rules sorts those annotations to generate what we call Semantic Snapshot of a Newscast (NSS). We benchmark this method against a gold standard generated by domain experts and assessed via a user survey over five BBC newscasts. Results of the experiments show the robustness of our approach holding an Average Normalized Discounted Cumulative Gain of 66.6%

The Television Spoiler Nuisance Rationale

This essay explores tensions surrounding television spoilers through interviews with thirteen people who are paid to write or edit discourse about television. These professionals include television critics, editors, an entertainment reporter, a popular culture writer, and a television columnist. Analysis of interview transcripts revealed that varying attitudes toward television pleasure undergird the spoiler debate. After describing three divergent television pleasure attitudes, we present the second half of our analysis: interviewees’ statements about the timing of their publications, the content of their writing, and the packaging of their writing. Properly packaging articles so that readers need to “opt in” was the only area of consensus among interviewees. The essay describes proper packaging through a nuisance rationale framework, one that reduces spoiler exposure for those who wish to avoid it but keeps engaging commentary available for those who actively seek it. These findings shed light on how to negotiate communicative tensions stemming from evolving media engagement patterns

A Topic Recommender for Journalists

The way in which people acquire information on events and form their own opinion on them has changed dramatically with the advent of social media. For many readers, the news gathered from online sources become an opportunity to share points of view and information within micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter, mainly aimed at satisfying their communication needs. Furthermore, the need to deepen the aspects related to news stimulates a demand for additional information which is often met through online encyclopedias, such as Wikipedia. This behaviour has also influenced the way in which journalists write their articles, requiring a careful assessment of what actually interests the readers. The goal of this paper is to present a recommender system, What to Write and Why, capable of suggesting to a journalist, for a given event, the aspects still uncovered in news articles on which the readers focus their interest. The basic idea is to characterize an event according to the echo it receives in online news sources and associate it with the corresponding readers’ communicative and informative patterns, detected through the analysis of Twitter and Wikipedia, respectively. Our methodology temporally aligns the results of this analysis and recommends the concepts that emerge as topics of interest from Twitter and Wikipedia, either not covered or poorly covered in the published news articles

Learning Wakanda: Assessing the Responses of African-American Children and Their Caregivers toward Concordant Educational Media

Screen-based educational media, as an extension of the schooling process whose history has mirrored brick and mortar institutions, have traditionally espoused narratives of Eurocentricity, shifting relatively recently to multicultural yet simultaneously raceless narratives. While many viewers have learned from and been inspired by these media, the enthusiastic response to the film Black Panther (2018), as demonstrated by financial earnings and sustained social media energy, revealed an intense yearning in the Black community for media positively centering the strengths and successes of Black lives. Launched from the sociocultural fervor for Black concordance in media, and extending concordance into the educational media landscape, this qualitative study sought to assess responses from African-American children, ages 3-8, to educational media concordant to them, and contextualize these responses in recognition of race socialization patterns within the home. Children’s responses to the media ranged from acknowledgment of skin color as well as hair texture and style, to full identification with and enthusiasm for animated protagonists. Caregivers responded positively to the samples while self- reporting varying degrees of race socialization. These responses demonstrated promising potential for identification with concordant educational media based on phenotypic resemblance, particularly for children approximately 8 years of age

Master of Science

thesisThe current study sought to understand the communicative construction of emotion in nonprofit organizations. Two research questions asked how nonprofit workers communicatively construct their emotion regarding the nature of nonprofit work and concerning their relationships with other nonprofit workers. Seventeen nonprofit workers were interviewed within one organization. Findings include defining, contextualizing, and constructing emotion explicitly in relation to the nature of nonprofit work. Concerning their relationships with other nonprofit workers, nonprofit workers relate to the organization, construct identities, and construct relationships with one another. The current work qualitatively adds to organizational communication literature, particularly at the intersection of nonprofit work, workers, and emotion. Most importantly, this study complicates current conceptualizations of emotion in nonprofit organizations by bringing in ideas of affect theory