White, Man, and Highly Followed: Gender and Race Inequalities in Twitter

Social media is considered a democratic space in which people connect and interact with each other regardless of their gender, race, or any other demographic factor. Despite numerous efforts that explore demographic factors in social media, it is still unclear whether social media perpetuates old inequalities from the offline world. In this paper, we attempt to identify gender and race of Twitter users located in U.S. using advanced image processing algorithms from Face++. Then, we investigate how different demographic groups (i.e. male/female, Asian/Black/White) connect with other. We quantify to what extent one group follow and interact with each other and the extent to which these connections and interactions reflect in inequalities in Twitter. Our analysis shows that users identified as White and male tend to attain higher positions in Twitter, in terms of the number of followers and number of times in user's lists. We hope our effort can stimulate the development of new theories of demographic information in the online space.Comment: In Proceedings of the IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'17). Leipzig, Germany. August 201

The Broken Village: Coffee, Migration, and Globalization in Honduras

[Excerpt] This book describes how people cope with rapid social change. It tells the story of the small town of La Quebrada, Honduras, which, over a five-year period from 2001-2006, transformed from a relatively isolated community of small-scale coffee farmers into a hotbed of migration from Honduras to the United States and back.1 During this time, the everyday lives of people in La Quebrada became connected to the global economy in a manner that was far different, and far more intimate, than anything they had experienced in the past. Townspeople did not generally view this transformation as a positive step toward progress or development. They saw migration as a temporary response to economic crisis, even as it became an ever more inescapable part of their livelihood. The chapters that follow trace the effects of migration across various domains of local life — including politics, religion, and family dynamics — describing how individuals in one community adapt to economic change. This is not a story about an egalitarian little Eden being corrupted by the forces of capitalist modernization. La Quebrada\u27s residents have lived with social inequality, violence, political conflict, and economic instability for generations. As coffee farmers, their fortunes have long been tied to the vicissitudes of global markets. However, the social changes wrought by migration presented qualitatively new challenges, as a functioning local economy became dependent on migrants working in distant places such as Long Island and South Dakota who lived in ways that most people in La Quebrada struggled to comprehend or explain. The new reality of migration created a sense of confusion that was especially strong in the early stages of La Quebrada\u27s migration boom, when communication between villagers and migrants was rare. The decline of coffee markets and the rise of the migration economy happened so quickly and chaotically that people struggled to understand, evaluate, and give meaning to the changes they wereexperiencing. Therefore, migration was experienced as sociocultural disintegration in 2003-2005, when the bulk of the research for this study was conducted

Suddenly last summer: how the tourist tsunami hit Lisbon

En el presente artículo fijamos nuestra atención en la capital de Portugal, Lisboa, y su reciente proceso de turistificación, que ha forzado a una revisión colectiva de la identidad de la ciudad y sus narrativas patrimoniales, para encajar los crecientes contrastes entre marginalidad y centralidad, circulación y calma, abandono y atención pública, indigencia y afluencia, spleen y euforia. Después de introducir nuestro foco teórico en el problema de los “comunales urbanos” y de presentar nuestra metodología cualitativa, pasamos a describir el proceso histórico que ha conducido a la transformación de Lisboa: desde el mega-evento de la Expo’98 cuando Lisboa era todavía un destino turístico periférico, hasta la presente economía urbana, especializada en el turismo y los servicios. Vamos a centrarnos especialmente en los proyectos y políticas implantadas “desde arriba” durante aquellos años y en la crisis financiera de 2008, usada para liberalizar varios aspectos de la economía.In this paper, we focus our attention in Portugal’s capital city, Lisbon, and in the recent process of its touristification, which is forcing a collective revision of the city’s identity and its patrimonial narratives, to make sense of the growing contrasts between marginality and centrality, circulation and calm, abandonment and limelight, indigence and affluence, spleen and euphoria. After introducing our theoretical focus on the problem of “urban commons” and the qualitative methodology used in the article, we describe the historical process that led to the transformation of Lisbon: from the Expo’98 megaevent when Lisbon was a peripheral tourism destiny, to the present urban economy that is specialized in tourism and services. We will focus especially in the top-down projects and policies developed during those years and the use of 2008 financial crisis to liberalize many aspects of economy

Creative identity theft: issues for artists in collaborative online environments

This paper discusses the qualities of online activity in relation to what is 'new' in 'new media', and examines both the continued use of the technologies by artists to simply redress long standing disputes with the distribution models and editorial practices of 'old media' and the tensions created by encounters with the characteristics of the Internet as a new space for art. It then seeks to identify the features of new technologies that distinguish them from 'old media', principally the opportunities for interaction in real time, for collaboration, of skill sharing, of a wider audience that encounters work for reasons other than the contemplation of artistic work and the nature of proprietary technologies in themselves. These latter have rarely been developed specifically for artists, and often reflect the values and aims of the companies that generate them, presenting ethical and creative problems for artists who use them. The paper draws on research at the Visualisation Research Unit (VRU) at the School of Art, Birmingham City University, and its collaboration with Eastside Projects, a new gallery located in Birmingham, on the Arts Council funded project 'EP:VV' (Eastside Projects: Virtual & Visualized)