21,669 research outputs found
Exploring Social Media for Event Attendance
Large popular events are nowadays well reflected in social media fora (e.g. Twitter), where people discuss their interest in participating in the events. In this paper we propose to exploit the content of non-geotagged posts in social media to build machine-learned classifiers able to infer users' attendance of large events in three temporal periods: before, during and after an event. The categories of features used to train the classifier reflect four different dimensions of social media: textual, temporal, social, and multimedia content. We detail the approach followed to design the feature space and report on experiments conducted on two large music festivals in the UK, namely the VFestival and Creamfields events. Our attendance classifier attains very high accuracy with the highest result observed for the Creamfields dataset ~87% accuracy to classify users that will participate in the event
Event Organization 101: Understanding Latent Factors of Event Popularity
The problem of understanding people's participation in real-world events has
been a subject of active research and can offer valuable insights for human
behavior analysis and event-related recommendation/advertisement. In this work,
we study the latent factors for determining event popularity using large-scale
datasets collected from the popular Meetup.com EBSN in three major cities
around the world. We have conducted modeling analysis of four contextual
factors (spatial, group, temporal, and semantic), and also developed a
group-based social influence propagation network to model group-specific
influences on events. By combining the Contextual features And Social Influence
NetwOrk, our integrated prediction framework CASINO can capture the diverse
influential factors of event participation and can be used by event organizers
to predict/improve the popularity of their events. Evaluations demonstrate that
our CASINO framework achieves high prediction accuracy with contributions from
all the latent features we capture.Comment: International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 2017
https://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM17/paper/view/1557
Getting In On the Act: How Arts Groups are Creating Opportunities for Active Participation
Arts participation is being redefined as people increasingly choose to engage with art in new, more active and expressive ways. This movement carries profound implications, and fresh opportunities, for the nonprofit arts sector.We are in the midst of a seismic shift in cultural production, moving from a "sit-back-and-be-told culture" to a "making-and-doing-culture." Active or participatory arts practices are emerging from the fringes of the Western cultural tradition to capture the collective imagination. Many forces have conspired to lead us to this point. The sustained economic downturn that began in 2008, rising ticket prices, the pervasiveness of social media, the roliferation of digital content and rising expectations for self-guided, on-demand, customized experiences have all contributed to a cultural environment primed for active arts practice. This shift calls for a new equilibrium in the arts ecology and a new generation of arts leaders ready to accept, integrate and celebrate all forms of cultural practice. This is, perhaps, the defining challenge of our time for artists, arts organizations and their supporters -- to embrace a more holistic view of the cultural ecology and identify new possibilities for Americans to engage with the arts.How can arts institutions adapt to this new environment?Is participatory practice contradictory to, or complementary to, a business model that relies on professional production and consumption?How can arts organizations enter this new territory without compromising their values r artistic ideals?This report aims to illuminate a growing body of practice around participatory engagement (with various illustrative case studies profiled at the end) and dispel some of the anxiety surrounding this sphere of activity
The call of the crowd: Event participation in location-based social services
Understanding the social and behavioral forces behind event participation is
not only interesting from the viewpoint of social science, but also has
important applications in the design of personalized event recommender systems.
This paper takes advantage of data from a widely used location-based social
network, Foursquare, to analyze event patterns in three metropolitan cities. We
put forward several hypotheses on the motivating factors of user participation
and confirm that social aspects play a major role in determining the likelihood
of a user to participate in an event. While an explicit social filtering signal
accounting for whether friends are attending dominates the factors, the
popularity of an event proves to also be a strong attractor. Further, we
capture an implicit social signal by performing random walks in a high
dimensional graph that encodes the place type preferences of friends and that
proves especially suited to identify relevant niche events for users. Our
findings on the extent to which the various temporal, spatial and social
aspects underlie users' event preferences lead us to further hypothesize that a
combination of factors better models users' event interests. We verify this
through a supervised learning framework. We show that for one in three users in
London and one in five users in New York and Chicago it identifies the exact
event the user would attend among the pool of suggestions.We acknowledge the support of Microsoft Research and EPSRC
through grant GALE (EP/K019392).This is the final published version. It's also available from AAAI at http://www.aaai.org/ocs/index.php/ICWSM/ICWSM14/paper/view/8068. Copyright © 2014, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved
Put on the Wig, It’s Time to Ball: Experiences of a Collegiate Men’s Basketball Fan Group
The purpose of this study is to explore the experiences of a collegiate men’s basketball fan group. Little research has been undertaken exploring student fan groups, especially using ethnographic methods. The primary researcher attended two men’s home basketball games at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, home of the student fan group, Orange Krush. The researcher also interviewed eleven Orange Krush members about their motivations and experiences in the group. The findings include a new benefit not previously found in the literature: Insider Access. An additional apparent theme was the importance of sport rituals, and the perception by the students that these rituals impact the outcome of the game. Finally, students indicated how the group improved their sense of community and diversity on campus. Implications of this research include sport management professionals emphasizing the importance of fan attendance on game success and ensuring fans feel they are closely connected to the teams so that they feel like insiders, which builds the emotional connection between fan and team
Crowds, Bluetooth and Rock’n’Roll: Understanding Music Festival Participant Behavior
In this paper we present a study of sensing and analyzing an offline social
network of participants at a large-scale music festival (8 days, 130,000+
participants). We place 33 fixed-location Bluetooth scanners in strategic spots
around the festival area to discover Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones carried by
the participants, and thus collect spatio-temporal traces of their mobility and
interactions. We subsequently analyze the data on two levels. On the micro
level, we run a community detection algorithm to reveal a variety of groups the
festival participants form. On the macro level, we employ an Infinite
Relational Model (IRM) in order to recover the structure of the social network
related to participants' music preferences. The obtained structure in the form
of clusters of concerts and participants is then interpreted using
meta-information about music genres, band origins, stages, and dates of
performances. We show that most of the concerts clusters can be described by
one or more of the meta-features, effectively revealing preferences of
participants (e.g. a cluster of US bands) and discuss the significance of the
findings and the potential and limitations of the used method. Finally, we
discuss the possibility of employing the described method and techniques for
creating user-oriented applications and extending the sensing capabilities
during large-scale events by introducing user involvement.Comment: Presented at Sunbelt 2013 in Hamburg on May, 201
Building a Music Festival: Understanding Media Industry Lore
Music festivals have become culturally salient within the new age of consumer participatory culture. Festivals fundamentally warrant a rite of passage by providing consumers a unique, all-encompassing experience. This critical media industry study examines the music festival industry and its’ usage of lore as industry held logics based off of perceptions of consumer wants and desires that calcify within the industry (Havens and Lotz, 2012). I contend three substantial and emergent lore in the music festival industry identified include millennials, experience economy, and prosumer culture. In addition, this thesis explores industry lore as various textual representations across social and physical media marketing platforms at music festivals
The Paradox of Popularity: Why Popularity Does Not Signal Participation
Although strong ties are typically formed in shared settings, we know little about the characteristics of settings that attract and retain people. Meanwhile, the Internet has broadened the search for settings. As people turn to the web to find local, offline social settings to join, simple, searchable features– notably location, interest, size and age–guide their choices. Whether such features are helpful for establishing meaningful social relations has not been empirically tested. Using unique data on participation in online to offline communities, we explore the characteristics that attract members and the features that aid in their retention. We find that, although prospective members seek large and established groups when searching for organizations, such groups are less likely to foster community through repeated participation
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