Constituency Communication in Changing Times

Addresses implications of constituency communication for the relationship between MPs and those they seek to represent Explores how democracy and democratic representation are changing in light of strategic uses of media Contributes to the understanding of issue that lie at the intersection of cultural, technological and political researc

Leading the conversation the use of Twitter by school leaders for professional development as their careers progress

A purposeful sample of 21 school leaders from the UK and abroad were interviewed about their use of Twitter. The Twitter timelines of these respondents were also analysed. The study was framed around four research questions designed to interrogate the issues surrounding senior leaders' use of Twitter. The data collected pointed towards the growing importance of Twitter as a forum for discussion about a whole gamut of issues related to education and leadership. The research uncovered important ways in which Twitter is being used to supplement, or in some cases replace, traditional modes of professional development. This is seen to have implications for the way leaders' careers evolve over time. A revised model of leadership career progression is proposed. The revised model provides a conceptual framework for charting social media engagement amongst leaders as their careers progress. By systematising social media engagement in this way, the study makes an important contribution to the corpus of knowledge that already exists in relation to social media use in educational settings. Practical implications include, amongst other things, suggested changes to the professional development of leaders and a call to greater awareness of social media amongst leaders themselves

Novel platform for topic group mining, crowd opinion analysis and opinion leader identification in on-line social network platforms

In recent years, topic group mining and massive crowd opinion analysis from on-line social network platforms have become some of the most important tasks not only in research area but also in industry. Systems of this sort can identify similar topics from a very large dataset, group them together based on the topic, and analyse the inclination of the content's owner. To solve this problem, which involves research from a number of different areas, an integrated platform needs to be proposed. Most community mining techniques treat the network as a graph where nodes represent users and edges reflect user relationship between two users. One obvious drawback of these approaches is that it can only utilise the explicit user relationships provided by on-line social network platforms. All other possible relationships will be ignored. Some on-line social network platforms restrict the length of content a user can publish. This causes traditional document clustering methods to perform poorly. Meanwhile, the restriction of content length also affects opinion mining performance since most content lacks contextual features. Hence, other context features that are not immediately or obviously related need to be investigated to improve performance in user inclination classification. This research proposes a novel three layered platform. Two core technologies of the platform are topic group mining and user inclination analysis. The integrated approach was evaluated by a series of experiments to examine each core technology. The results indicate that the proposed integrated platform is able to produce the following results. 1) Scores up to 0.82 by V-measure evaluation function in topic group mining. 2) High accuracy rate in inclination mining. 3) A flexible and adaptable platform design which can accommodate different on-line social networks easily

#identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation

"Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has served as a major platform for political performance, social justice activism, and large-scale public debates over race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and nationality. It has empowered minoritarian groups to organize protests, articulate often-underrepresented perspectives, and form community. It has also spread hashtags that have been used to bully and silence women, people of color, and LGBTQ people. #identity is among the first scholarly books to address the positive and negative effects of Twitter on our contemporary world. Hailing from diverse scholarly fields, all contributors are affiliated with The Color of New Media, a scholarly collective based at the University of California, Berkeley. The Color of New Media explores the intersections of new media studies, critical race theory, gender and women’s studies, and postcolonial studies. The essays in #identity consider topics such as the social justice movements organized through #BlackLivesMatter, #Ferguson, and #SayHerName; the controversies around #WhyIStayed and #CancelColbert; Twitter use in India and Africa; the integration of hashtags such as #nohomo and #onfleek that have become part of everyday online vernacular; and other ways in which Twitter has been used by, for, and against women, people of color, LGBTQ, and Global South communities. Collectively, the essays in this volume offer a critically interdisciplinary view of how and why social media has been at the heart of US and global political discourse for over a decade.

Social informatics

5th International Conference, SocInfo 2013, Kyoto, Japan, November 25-27, 2013, Proceedings</p

Tweets from the Campaign Trail

Hailed by many as a game-changer in political communication, Twitter has made its way into election campaigns all around the world. The European Parliamentary elections, taking place simultaneously in 28 countries, give us a unique comparative vision of the way the tool is used by candidates in different national contexts. This volume is the fruit of a research project bringing together scholars from 6 countries, specialised in communication science, media studies, linguistics and computer science. It seeks to characterise the way Twitter was used during the 2014 European election campaign, providing insights into communication styles and strategies observed in different languages and outlining methodological solutions for collecting and analysing political tweets in an electoral context