Macro-micro approach for mining public sociopolitical opinion from social media

During the past decade, we have witnessed the emergence of social media, which has prominence as a means for the general public to exchange opinions towards a broad range of topics. Furthermore, its social and temporal dimensions make it a rich resource for policy makers and organisations to understand public opinion. In this thesis, we present our research in understanding public opinion on Twitter along three dimensions: sentiment, topics and summary. In the first line of our work, we study how to classify public sentiment on Twitter. We focus on the task of multi-target-specific sentiment recognition on Twitter, and propose an approach which utilises the syntactic information from parse-tree in conjunction with the left-right context of the target. We show the state-of-the-art performance on two datasets including a multi-target Twitter corpus on UK elections which we make public available for the research community. Additionally we also conduct two preliminary studies including cross-domain emotion classification on discourse around arts and cultural experiences, and social spam detection to improve the signal-to-noise ratio of our sentiment corpus. Our second line of work focuses on automatic topical clustering of tweets. Our aim is to group tweets into a number of clusters, with each cluster representing a meaningful topic, story, event or a reason behind a particular choice of sentiment. We explore various ways of tackling this challenge and propose a two-stage hierarchical topic modelling system that is efficient and effective in achieving our goal. Lastly, for our third line of work, we study the task of summarising tweets on common topics, with the goal to provide informative summaries for real-world events/stories or explanation underlying the sentiment expressed towards an issue/entity. As most existing tweet summarisation approaches rely on extractive methods, we propose to apply state-of-the-art neural abstractive summarisation model for tweets. We also tackle the challenge of cross-medium supervised summarisation with no target-medium training resources. To the best of our knowledge, there is no existing work on studying neural abstractive summarisation on tweets. In addition, we present a system for providing interactive visualisation of topic-entity sentiments and the corresponding summaries in chronological order. Throughout our work presented in this thesis, we conduct experiments to evaluate and verify the effectiveness of our proposed models, comparing to relevant baseline methods. Most of our evaluations are quantitative, however, we do perform qualitative analyses where it is appropriate. This thesis provides insights and findings that can be used for better understanding public opinion in social media

Micro-level legitimacy in new industry creation : the role of media in legitimacy construction

What is in common in most of the research about emerging industries is how they emphasize the importance of gaining and maintaining legitimacy. This makes sense, as legitimacy is commonly considered difficult to be gained and repaired but manageable to maintain once gained. After all, legitimacy management bases greatly on communication, more precisely to communication between the organization and its several audiences. For this reason only, it is critical to deepen our understanding about legitimacy’s complexity and multiplicity. This research has gathered a comprehensive introduction to the existing research over legitimacy (Suchman 1995), which is the leading light of the study, and its surrounding themes, such as institutional theory (Meyer & Rowan 1997 and DiMaggio & Powell 1983) as background and emerging industries (Aldrich & Fiol 1994 and McGahan et. al. 2004) as related environment, which again create the constructing structure for the study. The literature implicates the same most of us have noted and witnessed; in today’s contemporary world, media, in all its forms, is a crucial macro-level actor which has a significant influencing power. Media has an impact on individuals’ impressions, attitudes and behavior towards the presented content in question, and thus has an impact on individuals’ micro-level legitimacy evaluations and judgments. This study concentrated on deepening our understanding and further illustrating the complexity of building legitimacy for new industry by using cryptocurrency industry as an illustrative example and utilizing the means of quasi-experimental research. Quasi-experimental research methods enabled to research the topic, nuances and trend changes in micro-level legitimacy views, which sometimes, is under such contextual constrain that it cannot be addressed with more conventional or standard approaches. Two major findings rose from the empirical findings; 1. All legitimacy category views (pragmatic, moral and cognitive) can be affected by and through media and 2. Respondents without prior experience in cryptocurrencies assumed that cryptocurrencies are generally considered as appropriate. Most notable findings within the sample group were related to nuance shifts and trend changes in respondents’ moral consequential legitimacy and cognitive comprehensibility views on micro-level, which were susceptible to media impact. It is commonly acknowledged that pragmatic legitimacy views reflect the audience self-interests directly or indirectly and therefore, can be manipulated and affected. However, it is notable that also parts of moral and cognitive legitimacy can be impacted, as they do not reflect individuals’ interest but rather individual’s evaluation what is correct and right thing to do and evaluation about inevitability. This study can be considered as a shout out for researchers to act upon the risen empirical findings to further study the phenomenon of impacting moral and cognitive micro-level legitimacy evaluations and judgments by and through media with either more in-depth qualitative approach or by conducting a true experiment with a larger sample group to generate results which could be more widely generalized

Constructing “development” A historical discourse analysis of newspapers regarding the creation of terminology and public discourse on Autism and Hattatsu Shogai in Japan

関西学院大

The Urban Political Ecology of Post-industrial Scottish Towns: Examining Greengairs and Ravenscraig

Urban ecological politics is shaped by both moments of concerted action and more silent perceptions and responses. Instead of only being evident in situations of organised protest, the politics of urban ecology is also manifested, in material and symbolic terms, in the daily life of the residents. The fragmentation of urban political ecology turns out to be an important element in the affirmation of post-political forms of urban governance. Those issues were the object of fieldwork research carried out in Greengairs and Ravenscraig, two towns in North Lanarkshire, near Glasgow, with the goal of unravelling the understanding and the coping mechanisms of environmentally deprived residents. The towns are permeated by a widespread, often dissimulated, political ecology that is nonetheless always present. Empirical results demonstrate that a more comprehensive handling of the political ecology of the urban is crucial in order to halt the sources of marginalisation and ecological degradation

Development of Activism: The Elders of the Anti-nuclear Movement

The US anti-nuclear movement formed in opposition to the development of nuclear weapons and energy. Anti-nuclear activists have rallied since the late 1970’s opposed to the construction of Plant Vogtle near Waynesboro, Georgia due to the social and environmental justice issues related to the nuclear industry. In 2010, the nuclear industry proposed a nuclear resurgence in the US, proposing to construct new reactors at Plant Vogtle. This represented the first time new nuclear reactors had been proposed since the moratorium on new reactors as a result of the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979. The aim of the study is to understand the experience of “first wave” anti-nuclear activists in Georgia (those engaged for twenty years or more). Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Framework was employed to locate anti-nuclear activists’ perceived facilitators and barriers to their activism. Semi-structured interviews with these activists yielded rich descriptions about their experience in the anti-nuclear movement. Activists endorsed facilitators and barriers related to individual characteristics however, the majority of activists perceived facilitators and barriers beyond the individual level. Specifically, the majority of activists mentioned facilitators and barriers relating to the media and political systems and the power and resource imbalances within society. The role of community psychology is discussed in relation to this field of inquiry

Trends and Topics: Characterizing Echo Chambers' Topological Stability and In-group Attitudes

Social Network sites are fertile ground for several polluting phenomena affecting online and offline spaces. Among these phenomena are included echo chambers, closed systems in which the opinions expressed by the people inside are exacerbated for the effect of the repetition, while opposite views are actively excluded. This paper offers a framework to explore, in a platform-independent manner, the topological changes through time of echo chambers, while considering the content posted by users and the attitude conveyed in discussing specific controversial issues. The proposed framework consists of four steps: (i) data collection and annotation of users' ideology regarding a controversial topic, (ii) construction of a dynamic network of interactions, (iii) ECs extraction and analysis of their dynamics, and (iv) topic extraction and valence analysis. The paper then enhances the formalization of the framework by conducting a case study on Reddit threads about sociopolitical issues (gun control, American politics, and minorities discrimination) during the first two years and a half of Donald Trump's presidency. The results unveil that users often stay inside echo chambers over time. Furthermore, in the analyzed discussions, the focus is on controversies related to right-wing parties and specific events in American and Canadian politics. The analysis of the attitude conveyed in the discussions shows a slight inclination toward a more negative or neutral attitude when discussing particularly sensitive issues, such as fascism, school shootings, or police violence.Comment: 24 pages, including 8 pages of Supplementary materials. Submitted to IEEE Acces

Immigration Discourses in the U.S. and in Japan

The primary purpose of this study was to investigate how systems of racial inequality and dominance produced at macro-institutional level discourses are reproduced and/or challenged in micro-interpersonal everyday discourses regarding immigration/foreign workers in the U.S. and in Japan. To establish a link between the discourses at these two levels, I employed a combination of critical and interpretive theoretical perspectives, and analyzed how racial ideologies were reproduced and/or challenged through participants\u27 use of various interpretative repertoires (i.e., discursive themes and specific rhetorical moves therein) and positioning of self and Others. Interpretative repertoires and discursive positioning of self and Others are major analytical frameworks of discursive psychology that were developed by Wetherell and Potter (1992), and I employed their discursive psychological analysis as the methodology for this study. The present study included 14 pairs of self-identified white Americans in the U.S. and 17 pairs of self-identified Japanese in Japan. I provided each pair with a discussion guide and asked the participants to record their 30-60 min long private conversations regarding immigration/foreign worker issues using the discussion guide that I provided. The analysis of the participants\u27 interpersonal discourses demonstrated the existence and significance of the dialectical relationship between macro and micro level discourses regarding racial ideologies. In addition, the juxtaposition of discourses of countries with different historical and sociopolitical contexts indicated the importance of taking historical and sociopolitical contexts into account to understand the process of reproducing systems of inequalities and dominance. Although similar discursive patterns were recognized, such as erasure of race and positioning of positive-self and negative-Others, the analysis showed that different backgrounds provide unique kinds of interpretative repertoires as resources to maintain and/or challenge dominant racial ideologies. The present results imply that successive studies on racialized discourses about immigration/foreign workers in the U.S. and Japan are necessary. Given the rapidly changing immigration policies and racial dynamics in the U.S. and Japan, it is important to track the reproduction of systemic racism and changes over time

Affecting Social Change for Transgender and Gender-Expansive Children: Exploring Advocates\u27 Perspectives

This interpretive case study explored the experience of advocates as they pursue social change for transgender and gender-expansive children (ages 4-12). The aim of the study is to improve current understanding of the process of advocacy for this population, as well as the context in which advocacy efforts occur. Data consisted of hour long interviews, advocacy artifacts as recommended by participants, and the researcher’s field journal. Participants included 12 advocates from a variety of backgrounds and geographic locations within the United States, to include educators, community advocates, and helping professionals. Implications of this study may include increased understanding of the advocacy process, and the various ways individuals navigate social systems to affect positive change for transgender and gender-expansive children

Colonization experiences of Alaskan Iñupiat and model for decolonization

Master's Project (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2016This project explores a potential method for examining American, Alaskan and Iñupiaq colonization with a process for decolonization to help restore authentic community self governance that addresses modern socioeconomic challenges and opportunities on terms that will best work in indigenous villages sustainably and effectively. The focus is on Iñupiaq peoples; however, it can be adapted for use by other indigenous peoples. The six-step decolonization process begins with building awareness and understanding the many layers of colonization - both from the colonizer’s perspective and perspective of those subjected to colonization. The decolonization process continues by encompassing healing, revitalization, vision, strategy and action, and leads to sustainability and growth. Decolonization is an individual and group choice that involves questioning, examining and analyzing political and economic relationships. Overall it can offer a contemporary paradigm shift that empowers cultural revitalization and restoring modern Iñupiatun self-determination. The social-cultural-economic costs of colonization to Iñupiat are significant historically, today and in the future. Examining the impacts of colonization puts an honest discussion on the table to identify and assess the damages, realize the ongoing costs to society, and build awareness of the systems for effective change. It could also help to create new decolonized political-economic responses that could aid in achieving equitable lives today to authentically achieve democracy, liberty and justice. Keywords: decolonization, colonization, self-governance