4,554 research outputs found

    A Survey of Location Prediction on Twitter

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    Locations, e.g., countries, states, cities, and point-of-interests, are central to news, emergency events, and people's daily lives. Automatic identification of locations associated with or mentioned in documents has been explored for decades. As one of the most popular online social network platforms, Twitter has attracted a large number of users who send millions of tweets on daily basis. Due to the world-wide coverage of its users and real-time freshness of tweets, location prediction on Twitter has gained significant attention in recent years. Research efforts are spent on dealing with new challenges and opportunities brought by the noisy, short, and context-rich nature of tweets. In this survey, we aim at offering an overall picture of location prediction on Twitter. Specifically, we concentrate on the prediction of user home locations, tweet locations, and mentioned locations. We first define the three tasks and review the evaluation metrics. By summarizing Twitter network, tweet content, and tweet context as potential inputs, we then structurally highlight how the problems depend on these inputs. Each dependency is illustrated by a comprehensive review of the corresponding strategies adopted in state-of-the-art approaches. In addition, we also briefly review two related problems, i.e., semantic location prediction and point-of-interest recommendation. Finally, we list future research directions.Comment: Accepted to TKDE. 30 pages, 1 figur

    Geography and art: encountering place across disciplines

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    This article summarises a project undertaken at the Newton Park campus of Bath Spa University over 1 week in October 2015. The project provided a space for interdisciplinary collaborations between geography and art students to explore the commonalities and differences in how they saw, interpreted and creatively re-presented the campus, using a variety of methods. This article outlines the project and reflects on the processes, outcomes, and challenges of collaboration. It highlights how this approach can enhance student learning experiences, by facilitating more interdisciplinary collaboration across the sciences, arts and humanities, and social sciences. In doing so, it explores the potential and pitfalls of collaborative cultural geography in practice across disciplines

    Characterizing Collective Attention via Descriptor Context: A Case Study of Public Discussions of Crisis Events

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    Social media datasets make it possible to rapidly quantify collective attention to emerging topics and breaking news, such as crisis events. Collective attention is typically measured by aggregate counts, such as the number of posts that mention a name or hashtag. But according to rationalist models of natural language communication, the collective salience of each entity will be expressed not only in how often it is mentioned, but in the form that those mentions take. This is because natural language communication is premised on (and customized to) the expectations that speakers and writers have about how their messages will be interpreted by the intended audience. We test this idea by conducting a large-scale analysis of public online discussions of breaking news events on Facebook and Twitter, focusing on five recent crisis events. We examine how people refer to locations, focusing specifically on contextual descriptors, such as "San Juan" versus "San Juan, Puerto Rico." Rationalist accounts of natural language communication predict that such descriptors will be unnecessary (and therefore omitted) when the named entity is expected to have high prior salience to the reader. We find that the use of contextual descriptors is indeed associated with proxies for social and informational expectations, including macro-level factors like the location's global salience and micro-level factors like audience engagement. We also find a consistent decrease in descriptor context use over the lifespan of each crisis event. These findings provide evidence about how social media users communicate with their audiences, and point towards more fine-grained models of collective attention that may help researchers and crisis response organizations to better understand public perception of unfolding crisis events.Comment: ICWSM 202

    Startup communities: notes on the sociality of tech-entrepreneurs in Manchester

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    In this contribution I explore the conflicting moralities and practices of technology entrepreneurship through the lenses of Mary Douglas’ Grid-Group Cultural Theory. Starting from the distinction between communitarian, individualistic and hierarchical culture, I explore my empirical material drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Manchester, UK. In particular, I describe the sociality of young male tech-entrepreneurs at networking events, ‘coffices’ and coworkspaces around an urban ‘creative quarter’. I argue that ‘startup communities’ simultaneously encourage individualistic market-competition, contribute to feelings of local group-belonging and are narrative constructions promoted by entrepreneurs, corporations and the State.Universidad de Sevill

    Social Media and the Construction and Propagation of Populist-Nationalist Discourse

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    The growing overlap between three important phenomena—the increasingly widespread use of social media (especially as a tool for political communication), the current populist zeitgeist (as described by Cas Mudde), and the rise of right-wing nationalism—make the question of how social media can be employed as a platform for the amplification of populist-nationalist discourse particularly pressing. This paper explores the affordances of social media that allow for its employment in the creation and propagation of populist-nationalist discourse, particularly the elective affinity between social media and populism, the way that social media can provide a platform for the emotive element of populist-nationalist discourse, and how social media can facilitate the amplification of conspiratorial thinking (characteristic of right-wing populism). To further elucidate this theoretical discussion, this paper will also explore Donald Trump’s online discourse surrounding the 2018 migrant caravan as a case study. Ultimately, this paper highlights how social media has provided an effective medium for the increasing interplay between nationalist and populist discourse

    Crowdsourcing the Reputation of Martin Luther King: Twitter as a Place of Memory

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    This dissertation develops the idea of crowdsourced memory. The term captures three important developments in the conceptualization, technological delivery, and analytical study of public memory. In terms of conceptualization, a crowdsourcing approach recognizes that the remembering of the past is an inherently collective and often competitive enterprise in which the public participates in the co-construction of memory and the meanings of memorial landscapes and places. A crowdsourcing approach also recognizes the growing influence of the Internet and social media as not just a means of communication, but also a system of cultural and place representation, as well as, a memory technology—a way of expressing views about the past, but also a way of recording the history of place experiences at places devoted to the past. The posting of experiences and opinions through platforms, such as, Twitter have dramatically expanded public expression and contribution to the project of remembering, interpreting, and re-interpreting the past. Finally, a crowdsourcing approach represents a new methodology that recognizes social media posts provide an important source of not only quantitative, but also meaningful qualitative data for scholars to understand how the legacy and reputation of individuals and organizations are communicated, consumed, and co-constructed by the public. This dissertation also employs qualitative geographic information sciences to examine the locational variation of the themes associated with each Tweet. This dissertation applies a crowdsource approach based on critical race theory to understand the reputational politics that surround the annual holiday dedicated to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr

    Marketing, art and voices of dissent: promotional methods of protest art by the 2014 Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement

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    Limited research exists around the interrelationships between protest camps and marketing practices. In this paper, we focus on the 2014 Hong Kong protest camps as a context where artistic work was innovatively developed and imaginatively promoted to draw global attention. Collecting and analyzing empirical data from the Umbrella Movement, our findings explore the interrelationships between arts marketing technologies and the creativity and artistic expression of the protest camps so as to inform, update and rethink arts marketing theory itself. We discuss how protesters used public space to employ inventive methods of audience engagement, participation and co-creation of artwork, together with media art projects which aimed not only to promote their collective aims but also to educate and inform citizens. While some studies have already examined the function of arts marketing beyond traditional and established artistic institutions, our findings offer novel insights into the promotional techniques of protest art within the occupied space of a social movement. Finally, we suggest avenues for future research around the artwork of social movements that could highlight creative and political aspects of (arts) marketing theory
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