Digital vernetztes Handeln verstehen: Eine Fallstudie zu #HomeToVote und dem irischen Abtreibungsreferendum 2018

Digitally networked action (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012) has become a prominent political reality. This article explores the evolution of digitally networked action, considering the Twitter hashtag #HomeToVote in 2018 as a relevant case. The case study features the return of Irish expatriates to their home country to vote in the referendum on abortion rights, since no postal votes were available to Irish citizens abroad. We investigated how actors participated in digitally networked action on Twitter, viewed from three perspectives: composition, diffusion, and dynamics. Through an @-mention network with 7,373 edges and 5,198 nodes, built on all original tweets (N = 33,927) about #HomeToVote, we interpreted the digitally networked action based on social interaction and information distribution between and beyond categorized subgroups of actors during four phases. The early phases of #HomeToVote are related to engagement and mobilization, while the latter phases are associated with experience sharing and solidarity declaration. Throughout the development of #HomeToVote, individuals and organizational actors show collective endeavors to promote digitally networked action, while media actors use Twitter to consistently depict moments of #HomeToVote. The findings suggest that #HomeToVote, as an organizationally enabled advocacy network, has a large political capacity to share communication linkages, facilitate flexible affiliations, and employ personalized engagement mechanisms.Dieser Artikel untersucht den Twitter-Hashtag #HomeToVote im Jahr 2018 als relevanten Fall der Entwicklung der „digitally networked action“ (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012). In der Fallstudie geht es um die Rückkehr irischer Auswanderer in ihr Heimatland, um an dem Referendum über Abtreibungsrechte teilzunehmen, da irischen Bürger*innen im Ausland keine Briefwahl möglich war. Wir untersuchten, wie Akteure an der „digitally networked action“ auf Twitter teilnahmen, aus drei Perspektiven: Zusammensetzung, Diffusion und Dynamik. Anhand eines @-mention-Netzwerks mit 7.373 Kanten und 5.198 Knoten, das auf allen Original-Tweets (N = 33.927) zum Thema #HomeTo-Vote aufgebaut wurde, interpretierten wir die „digitally networked action“ anhand der sozialen Interaktion und Informationsverteilung zwischen kategorisierten Untergruppen von Akteuren innerhalb von vier Phasen. Die frühen Phasen von #HomeToVote stehen im Zusammenhang mit Engagement und Mobilisierung, während die späteren Phasen mit Erfahrungsaustausch und Solidaritätserklärungen verbunden sind. Während der gesamten Entwicklung von #HomeToVote zeigen Individuen und organisatorische Akteure kollektive Bemühungen, um „digitally networked action“ zu fördern, während Medienakteure Twitter nutzen, um Momente von #HomeToVote konsistent darzustellen. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass #HomeToVote als organisatorisch ermöglichtes Advocacy-Netzwerk eine große politische Kapazität hat, um Kommunikationsverbindungen zu teilen, flexible Zugehörigkeiten zu erleichtern und personalisierte Engagement-Mechanismen zu ermöglichen

The viral diffusion of campaign messages about political issues during the 2016 U.S. presidential election

With candidates using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as part of their campaign strategies, social scientists are trying to understand the diffusion of political messages. Viral events can spread messages fast and far from the source, bringing candidate’s messages to new audiences and bringing new followers to candidates. To date, no studies have focused on understanding specifically what kinds of political issues the public spreads into their own networks. While the kinds of issues that spread will likely change from election to election, this work provides a comparison point for future work and is the first step in more real-time analysis that could be useful for researchers, journalists, and politicians. For this poster abstract we highlight part of our analysis, specifically, the frequency with which presidential candidates tweeted about specific issues and how the public responded by retweeting. To accomplish this, we use data visualization for exploratory data analysis. We find that that candidates and the public are most interested in different topics, but that both the public and candidates are more interested in advocacy messages than attack messages for every topic. For the final poster we will present analysis of both Facebook and Twitter, as well as confirmatory statistical analysis using regression modeling

Post-Translational Protein Deimination Signatures in Serum and Serum-Extracellular Vesicles of Bos taurus Reveal Immune, Anti-Pathogenic, Anti-Viral, Metabolic and Cancer-Related Pathways for Deimination

The bovine immune system is known for its unusual traits relating to immunoglobulin and antiviral responses. Peptidylarginine deiminases (PADs) are phylogenetically conserved enzymes that cause post-translational deimination, contributing to protein moonlighting in health and disease. PADs also regulate extracellular vesicle (EV) release, forming a critical part of cellular communication. As PAD-mediated mechanisms in bovine immunology and physiology remain to be investigated, this study profiled deimination signatures in serum and serum-EVs in Bos taurus. Bos EVs were poly-dispersed in a 70−500 nm size range and showed differences in deiminated protein cargo, compared with whole sera. Key immune, metabolic and gene regulatory proteins were identified to be post-translationally deiminated with some overlapping hits in sera and EVs (e.g., immunoglobulins), while some were unique to either serum or serum-EVs (e.g., histones). Protein−protein interaction network analysis of deiminated proteins revealed KEGG pathways common for serum and serum-EVs, including complement and coagulation cascades, viral infection (enveloped viruses), viral myocarditis, bacterial and parasitic infections, autoimmune disease, immunodeficiency intestinal IgA production, B-cell receptor signalling, natural killer cell mediated cytotoxicity, platelet activation and hematopoiesis, alongside metabolic pathways including ferroptosis, vitamin digestion and absorption, cholesterol metabolism and mineral absorption. KEGG pathways specific to EVs related to HIF-1 signalling, oestrogen signalling and biosynthesis of amino acids. KEGG pathways specific for serum only, related to Epstein−Barr virus infection, transcription mis-regulation in cancer, bladder cancer, Rap1 signalling pathway, calcium signalling pathway and ECM-receptor interaction. This indicates differences in physiological and pathological pathways for deiminated proteins in serum-EVs, compared with serum. Our findings may shed light on pathways underlying a number of pathological and anti-pathogenic (viral, bacterial, parasitic) pathways, with putative translatable value to human pathologies, zoonotic diseases and development of therapies for infections, including anti-viral therapies

News devices : how digital objects participate in news work and research

News work is increasingly taking place in and through a variety of intersecting digital devices, from websites, to search engines, online platforms, apps, bots, web analytics, data analysis and visualisation tools. These devices are also increasingly used as resources in digital research, and their implications are yet to be fully understood. This thesis examines how digital objects participate in news work and research. To this end, I propose an orientation towards the news device as a research topic and approach. The news device approach calls attention to the ways in which practices and relations are co-produced with digital objects involved in news work. It also attends to how such digital devices may afford modes of studying these practices. To make the case for this approach, I examine the participation of three types of devices in three aspects of news work: (1) the role of the network graph in journalistic storytelling, (2) the role of the online platform in journalism coding, and (3) the role of the web tracker in news audience commodification. In all, the thesis contributes to understanding the digital transformations of news in two ways. First, it develops a rich, nuanced, multidisciplinary, collaborative and reflexive approach to news research with digital methods. Secondly, it provides novel insights into how digital devices shape both news processes and relations with the online advertising and marketing industries, commercial online platforms, digital visual culture, and other digital content producers

Political organisation, leadership and communication in authoritarian settings: Digital activism in Belarus and Russia

Citizens of authoritarian regimes face multiple constraints when they express critical political views using digital media. The regime may monitor their activities, censor their speech or persecute them. Despite these challenges, politically-active citizens organise outside of traditional hierarchical arrangements to advocate for pro-democracy changes. I analyse how the affordances of digital media help activists to organise, to select and to protect their leaders, as well as to distribute information. I use interviews, content analysis and participant observation to study two recent cases of successful political campaigning on digital media. Unusually, both cases managed to challenge the state elites in authoritarian countries, Belarus and Russia respectively. I found that the two studied organisations relied on ad hoc, segmented and shadowed organisational configurations that deployed vast digital communication infrastructures to disseminate information. Journalists, the authorities and the public often misperceived these configurations as either over-centralised or not organised at all. This misperception, as well as the management of leadership visibility on social media, allowed activist groups to protect some of their leaders from persecution. The findings contribute to the discussion regarding the nature of political organising in the digital age by refining and problematising social movement theories for digital authoritarian contents. The study also contributes to the discussion of the strategies that authoritarian regimes use to respond to and combat online opposition. These findings challenge the idea that authoritarian regimes have neared full co-optation of the internet. Instead, the internet should be considered as a battlefield for political influence

Boredom Is Always Counter-revolutionary : Affective Political Activism in Participatory Online Communities

My thesis examines how fan communities on Facebook can become centres of political activism, operating through members’ affective ties to the cause and community, and networked communication. I conduct an ethnographic study of two Facebook communities—the street-photography page Humans of New York, and the page of the anonymous internet comedian who calls himself the Facebook God. Through a discursive analysis of the content of these pages and socio-political issues discussed by the members, I try demonstrate that Facebook activism can serve as an important gateway to civic engagement, through affective politics and connective action. Participatory online communities allow members to reimagine political issues in deeply personal terms, through storytelling and communal solidarity. Therefore, these spaces can become virtual classrooms for potential political activists, by redefining activism as a fun communal endeavor, and lowering the boundaries of participation

New results in Branching processes using Stochastic Approximation

We consider various types of continuous-time two-type population size-dependent Markov Branching Process (BP). The offspring distribution can depend on the current population (those alive at the given time) and or on the total population (dead and alive) of the two types. Using stochastic approximation techniques, we propose an ODE-based framework to study a general class of such BPs. We primarily focus on time-asymptotic proportion of the two types, via ODE limits; while, the ODE solution approximates certain normalized trajectories. In addition to extending the analysis of several existing BPs, we analyze two new variants: BP with attack and acquisition, and BP with proportion-dependent offsprings. Using these results, we study competition in viral markets and fake news control on online social networks.Comment: 54 pages; 1 table; 5 figure

A Molecular Signature of Proteinuria in Glomerulonephritis

Proteinuria is the most important predictor of outcome in glomerulonephritis and experimental data suggest that the tubular cell response to proteinuria is an important determinant of progressive fibrosis in the kidney. However, it is unclear whether proteinuria is a marker of disease severity or has a direct effect on tubular cells in the kidneys of patients with glomerulonephritis. Accordingly we studied an in vitro model of proteinuria, and identified 231 “albumin-regulated genes” differentially expressed by primary human kidney tubular epithelial cells exposed to albumin. We translated these findings to human disease by studying mRNA levels of these genes in the tubulo-interstitial compartment of kidney biopsies from patients with IgA nephropathy using microarrays. Biopsies from patients with IgAN (n = 25) could be distinguished from those of control subjects (n = 6) based solely upon the expression of these 231 “albumin-regulated genes.” The expression of an 11-transcript subset related to the degree of proteinuria, and this 11-mRNA subset was also sufficient to distinguish biopsies of subjects with IgAN from control biopsies. We tested if these findings could be extrapolated to other proteinuric diseases beyond IgAN and found that all forms of primary glomerulonephritis (n = 33) can be distinguished from controls (n = 21) based solely on the expression levels of these 11 genes derived from our in vitro proteinuria model. Pathway analysis suggests common regulatory elements shared by these 11 transcripts. In conclusion, we have identified an albumin-regulated 11-gene signature shared between all forms of primary glomerulonephritis. Our findings support the hypothesis that albuminuria may directly promote injury in the tubulo-interstitial compartment of the kidney in patients with glomerulonephritis

How Affect Rhetoric And A Changing Digital Landscape Shape Youth Digital Social Movements Of The Twenty-First Century

This dissertation explores three youth digital social movements, which have taken place throughout the twenty-first century: the Invisible Children movement of Uganda, the Bring Back Our Girls movement of Nigeria, and the Never Again movement of the United States. Using rhetorical analysis of each movement, I explore the relationship each has with youth, digital, social movement, and activism. Specifically, I seek to answer the following research questions: (1) with youth in the forefront of each movement, how have the movements utilized affective rhetoric to promote and gain support, and (2) how have youth digital social movements evolved throughout the twenty-first century?I argue that key components of youth digital social activism include the ability to get movement followers to connect on an emotional level with the cause of the movement in order to get them to move offline and act outside of the digital realm and providing specific, detailed steps for movement followers to avoid getting stuck in the online vortex that can lead to a version of slacktivism. Ultimately, this research provides insight for future social activists and movement leaders to learn from and adapt accordingly, and important areas for future scholars to focus their attention