Models of Social Groups in Blogosphere Based on Information about Comment Addressees and Sentiments

This work concerns the analysis of number, sizes and other characteristics of groups identified in the blogosphere using a set of models identifying social relations. These models differ regarding identification of social relations, influenced by methods of classifying the addressee of the comments (they are either the post author or the author of a comment on which this comment is directly addressing) and by a sentiment calculated for comments considering the statistics of words present and connotation. The state of a selected blog portal was analyzed in sequential, partly overlapping time intervals. Groups in each interval were identified using a version of the CPM algorithm, on the basis of them, stable groups, existing for at least a minimal assumed duration of time, were identified.Comment: Gliwa B., Ko\'zlak J., Zygmunt A., Models of Social Groups in Blogosphere Based on Information about Comment Addressees and Sentiments, in the K. Aberer et al. (Eds.): SocInfo 2012, LNCS 7710, pp. 475-488, Best Paper Awar

The Tumblarians

This paper examines the tumblarians as an information community and discusses community membership, information behaviours, and complementary models for a situated understanding of this unique personal-professional community. A review of the literature concerning LIS bloggers is presented as a complement to the tumblarians, who have no in depth treatment in the research as yet. Characteristics particular to the tumblarians are explored through informal conversation with a community member, and Fisher, Unruh, and Durrance\u27s (2003) information communities model is employed to provide a deeper understanding of the information behaviour of the tumblarians. This paper offers suggestions for future research based on the preliminary findings of the tumblarians as LIS bloggers and a virtual community

Identification of Group Changes in Blogosphere

The paper addresses a problem of change identification in social group evolution. A new SGCI method for discovering of stable groups was proposed and compared with existing GED method. The experimental studies on a Polish blogosphere service revealed that both methods are able to identify similar evolution events even though both use different concepts. Some differences were demonstrated as wellComment: The 2012 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining, IEEE Computer Society, 2012, pp. 1233-123

Exploring Russian Cyberspace: Digitally-Mediated Collective Action and the Networked Public Sphere

This paper summarizes the major findings of a three-year research project to investigate the Internet's impact on Russian politics, media and society. We employed multiple methods to study online activity: the mapping and study of the structure, communities and content of the blogosphere; an analogous mapping and study of Twitter; content analysis of different media sources using automated and human-based evaluation approaches; and a survey of bloggers; augmented by infrastructure mapping, interviews and background research. We find the emergence of a vibrant and diverse networked public sphere that constitutes an independent alternative to the more tightly controlled offline media and political space, as well as the growing use of digital platforms in social mobilization and civic action. Despite various indirect efforts to shape cyberspace into an environment that is friendlier towards the government, we find that the Russian Internet remains generally open and free, although the current degree of Internet freedom is in no way a prediction of the future of this contested space

Analysis of roles and groups in blogosphere

In the paper different roles of users in social media, taking into consideration their strength of influence and different degrees of cooperativeness, are introduced. Such identified roles are used for the analysis of characteristics of groups of strongly connected entities. The different classes of groups, considering the distribution of roles of users belonging to them, are presented and discussed.Comment: 8th International Conference on Computer Recognition Systems, CORES 201

Portrayal and Perception: Two Audits of News Media Reporting on African American Men and Boys

The Heinz Endowments' African American Men and Boys Task Force conducted an audit of media reporting on black men and boys in Pittsburgh. Based on content analysis of newspapers and evening newscasts, in addition to a survey and video interviews, the findings highlight a media scene that underrepresents African-Americans males, especially in terms of their positive achievements

Stance-taking and public discussion in blogs.

Blogs, which can be written and read by anyone with a computer and an internet connection, would seem to expand the possibilities for engagement in public sphere debates. Indeed, blogs are full of the kind of vocabulary that suggests intense discussion. However, a closer look at the way this vocabulary is used in context suggests that the main concern of writers is selfpresentation, positioning themselves in a crowded forum, in what has been called stancetaking. When writers mark their stances, for instance by saying I think, they enact different ways of signalling a relation to others, marking disagreement, enacting surprise, andironicising previous contributions. All these moves are ways of presenting one’s own contribution as distinctive, showing one’s entitlement to a position. In this paper, I use concordance tools to identify strings that are very frequent in a corpus of blogs, relative to a general corpus of written texts, focus on those relatively frequent words that mark stance and analyse these markers in context. I argue that the prominence of stance-taking indicates the priority of individual positioning over collective and deliberative discussion

Youth Activism and Public Space in Egypt

Examines youth activists' use of virtual and physical public spaces before, during, and after the January 25 Revolution. Profiles three organizations and analyzes the power and limitations of social media to spur civic action, as well as the role of art