An overview study of twitter in the UK local government

Copyright @ 2012 Brunel UniversityMicroblogging applications are becoming a momentous element of the public sector social media agenda. The potential of Twitter to update the public with frequent, concise and real-time content has motivated many pubic authorities to create their accounts, thus generating an interesting topic for research. This paper seeks to make an empirical and methodological contribution to this new body of knowledge by presenting an overview study of general Twitter accounts maintained by UK local government authorities. Over 296,000 tweets were collected from the 187officially listed local government accounts. The analysis was conducted in two stages: an examination of the Twitter networks developed by the accounts was followed by a structural analysis of the tweets. The combination of online research and social media analytics techniques enabled us to reach important conclusions about the use of Twitter by those authorities. The findings indicate high level of maturity of Twitter in the UK local government and point to several directions for further increasing the impact and visibility of those accounts within a social media strategy

TWITTER AND THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE – A GRAPH ANALYSIS OF GERMAN POLITICIANS

This paper examines the Twitter social graph of German politicians and political parties during a time period not potentially biased by nearby elections. Based on a data set of 1,719 politicians across the entire political spectrum of this important country in the EU, two graphs are constructed, which also reflect relationships within and between parties: the follower graph, consisting of all follower-followee relationships between German politicians, and the “mention graph”, which models direct references of politicians to their colleagues. Our main contributions are as follows: First, we analyse these graphs according to several statistics and graph metrics, characterizing political parties according to their collective participation in Twit-ter. We also investigate the openness for following ideas across political camps, resulting in the dis-covery of three distinct groups of political parties. We also find that membership in political parties itself explains only little of the variation in the formation of ties. There is also evidence that politicians with less activity exhibit a higher degree of openness than users with active engagement in tweets and discussions. This case study on social media adoption in politics leads to interesting insights into po-litical debate in the information society

Political Polarisation and Network Leaderships in the Catalan Parliamentarians Twitter Network

This article seeks to test if Twitter is opening communication flows between parties and paving the way for the appearance of network leaderships or if it is reducing them to representatives of the same party or ideology and empowering party leaders. The study is based on a dataset spanning from 1 January 2013 to 31 March 2014 which covers all relationships (4,516), retweets (6,045) and mentions (19,507) of Catalan parliamentarians. The data sustain that the political polarisation of Catalan parliamentarians¿ Twitter flows is deeper in the relationship and retweet networks than it is in the mention and that even if party leaders are still at the centre of communication flows, other parliamentarians are taking the floor and becoming network leaders.Este artículo trata de probar si Twitter abre flujos de comunicación entre partidos distintos y allana el camino para la aparición de liderazgos en la red o si los reduce a representantes del mismo partido o ideología y empodera a los líderes del partido. El estudio se basa en un conjunto de datos que abarca desde 1 de enero de 2013 al 31 de marzo de 2014 e incluye todas las relaciones (4516), retweets (6045) y menciones (19.507) de los parlamentarios catalanes. Los datos sostienen que la polarización política de los parlamentarios catalanes en los intercambios de Twitter es más profunda en las redes de relaciones y las redes de retweets que en las redes de menciones y que, aunque los líderes del partido se encuentran todavía en el centro de los flujos de comunicación, otros parlamentarios están tomando la palabra y se están convirtiendo en líderes en la red

Towards a hyperlinked society : a critical review of link studies

The hyperlink is a fundamental feature of the web. This paper investigates how hyperlinks have been used as research objects in social sciences. Reviewing a body of literature belonging to sociology, political sciences, information sciences, geography or media studies, it particularly reflects on the study of hyperlinks as indicators of other social phenomena. Why are links counted and hyperlink networks measured? How are links interpreted? The paper then focuses on barriers and limitations to the study of links. It addresses the issue of unobtrusiveness, the importance of interpreting links in context, and the possibilities of large-scale, automatic link studies. We finally argue that beyond the apparent diversity and ad hoc methodologies that the reviewed studies propose, a unified framework exists. It combines quantitative link counts, qualitative inquiries and valuation of field expertise to support link interpretation

Echo Chambers in Parliamentary Twitter Networks:The Catalan Case

Social media is transforming relations among members of parliaments, but are members taking advantage of these new media to broaden their party and ideological communication environment, or they are mainly communicating with other party members and ideologically aligned peers? This article tests whether parliamentarians’ use of Twitter is opening communication flows or confining them to representatives of the same party or ideology. The study is based on a data set spanning the period January 1, 2013, to March 31, 2014, which covers all relations (4,516), retweets (6,045), and mentions (19,507) among Catalan parliamentarians. Our results indicate that communication flows are polarized along party and ideological lines. The degree of polarization of this network depends, however, on where the interactions occur: The relations network is the most polarized; cross-party and cross-ideological interactions are greater in the retweet network and most present in the mention network

Volunteering and Civic Service in Three African Regions: Contributions to Regional Integration, Youth Development and Peace

This paper broadly looks at the role of youth volunteering in cultivating peace and development in Sub-Saharan Africa

Issue networks on the Web: a proposal of components and characterization

Para muchos tipos de investigación en ciencias sociales, políticas o de mercado, existe la necesidad de obtener información sobre la opinión o la reacción pública ante determinados temas. La web es una fuente de información que puede ayudar a satisfacer esta necesidad, pero para conseguir este objetivo es necesario desarrollar conceptos y metodologías que nos permitan entender su funcionamiento y extraer las diferentes formas de conocimiento que contiene. En este artículo presentamos el concepto de “red temática”; y a través de una revisión teórica de los estudios de hiperenlaces, de los conceptos de tema y actor y del propio concepto de red temática, exponemos sus características, la problemática que resuelve y las posibilidades que ofrece a los estudios de opinión.Many types of research on Social Sciences, Political Sciences and Market Sciences present the need to obtain information about the opinion or public reaction to certain topics. The Web is a source of information which might help satisfying this need, but to achieve this goal it is necessary to develop concepts and methodologies allowing to understand how it works, and to extract the different forms of knowledge it contains. This article presents the concept of “issue network”, and through a theoretical revision of hyperlink studies, the concepts of “issue” and “actor” and the concept of issue network itself, we expose its characteristics, the problems it solves and the possibilities it offers to opinion studies

Interactions of cultures and top people of Wikipedia from ranking of 24 language editions

Wikipedia is a huge global repository of human knowledge, that can be leveraged to investigate interwinements between cultures. With this aim, we apply methods of Markov chains and Google matrix, for the analysis of the hyperlink networks of 24 Wikipedia language editions, and rank all their articles by PageRank, 2DRank and CheiRank algorithms. Using automatic extraction of people names, we obtain the top 100 historical figures, for each edition and for each algorithm. We investigate their spatial, temporal, and gender distributions in dependence of their cultural origins. Our study demonstrates not only the existence of skewness with local figures, mainly recognized only in their own cultures, but also the existence of global historical figures appearing in a large number of editions. By determining the birth time and place of these persons, we perform an analysis of the evolution of such figures through 35 centuries of human history for each language, thus recovering interactions and entanglement of cultures over time. We also obtain the distributions of historical figures over world countries, highlighting geographical aspects of cross-cultural links. Considering historical figures who appear in multiple editions as interactions between cultures, we construct a network of cultures and identify the most influential cultures according to this network.Comment: 32 pages. 10 figures. Submitted for publication. Supporting information is available on http://www.quantware.ups-tlse.fr/QWLIB/topwikipeople