Variations in the Temporal Structure of Sociability across American Cities

Sociology ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 003803852095694
Author(s):  
Dhiraj Murthy ◽  
John D O’Brien ◽  
Alexander Gross ◽  
Nathan Meyers
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Geographic Proximity ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Highly Educated ◽  
Per Capita ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
American Cities ◽  
Media Data

Though sociologists have been interested in how temporal patterns of sociability vary in urban contexts, the study of city-level dynamics at short timescales has been challenging historically. Social media and new computational methods provide a solution. Our study clusters cities using sociality as a metric. We collected three months of social media data to investigate variation in the temporal structure of sociability across American cities. We find that cities cluster into three distinct types (‘Coastal’, ‘Transitional’ and ‘Heartland’) and that geographic proximity together with race, education and language associate with this clustering. Specifically, we found that clusters of Blacker cities tend to tweet more per capita, but also that more highly educated cities tend to tweet less per capita. These findings provide evidence that social media may be facilitating new opportunities to empower traditionally marginalized urban groups, a conclusion relevant to #BlackLivesMatter, the George Floyd protests and other social movements.

scholarly journals The climate change movement and political parties: Mechanisms of social media and interaction during the 2019 electoral period in Finland

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-60
Author(s):  
Sonja Savolainen ◽  
Tuomas Ylä-Anttila
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Parties ◽  
Comparative Studies ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Interaction Dynamics ◽  
The Government ◽  
Media Data

Abstract Building on the framework of electoral contention, we investigate the interaction dynamics between social movements and political parties during elections. We argue that social media today is an important venue for these interactions, and consequently, analysing social media data is useful for understanding the shifts in the conflict and alliance structures between movements and parties. We find that Twitter discussions on the climate change movement during the 2019 electoral period in Finland reveal a process of pre-election approaching and post-election distancing between the movement and parties. The Greens and the Left formed mutually beneficial coalitions with the movement preceding the elections and took distance from one another after these parties entered the government. These findings suggest that research on movement-party interaction should pay more attention to social media and undertake comparative studies to assess whether the approaching-distancing process and its constituent mechanisms characterise movements beyond the climate strikes in Finland.

Covering Protests on Twitter: The Influences on Journalists’ Social Media Portrayals of Left- and Right-Leaning Demonstrations in Brazil

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 260-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel R. Mourão ◽  
Weiyue Chen
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Mixed Methodology ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Media Portrayals ◽  
Media Sociology ◽  
Left And Right ◽  
The Right ◽  
Media Data ◽  
The Way

This study uses a media sociology approach to untangle how multiple influences shape the way journalists cover left- and right-leaning protests on social media. Several studies have investigated how reporters portray social movements, finding that news marginalizes protestors by focusing on spectacle and violent tactics to the detriment of their ideas. In this study, we turn to journalists’ Twitter accounts to analyze if these patterns are transferred to social media, as predicted by the literature on normalization of new affordances. Through a mixed methodology matching survey and social media data from 466 Brazilian journalists who tweeted about protests in 2013 and 2015, results revealed individual attitudes predicted coverage, indicating that social media was a space for personal, not professional, expression. Contrary to the literature, findings show that social media portrayals were more legitimizing during the left-leaning demonstrations than during the right-leaning elite-driven one. As a result, marginalizing patterns of protest coverage were challenged, not replicated, on Twitter. These findings suggest a limitation of the theory of normalization to explain how global journalists use social media.

scholarly journals Integrating the Eigendecomposition Approach and k-Means Clustering for Inferring Building Functions with Location-Based Social Media Data

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 834
Author(s):  
Feng Gao ◽  
Guanping Huang ◽  
Shaoying Li ◽  
Ziwei Huang ◽  
Lei Chai
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Spatial Structure ◽  
Human Activities ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Urban Spatial Structure ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Function Identification ◽  
Effective Principal ◽  
Media Data

Understanding the relationship between human activity patterns and urban spatial structure planning is one of the core research topics in urban planning. Since a building is the basic spatial unit of the urban spatial structure, identifying building function types, according to human activities, is essential but challenging. This study presented a novel approach that integrated the eigendecomposition method and k-means clustering for inferring building function types according to location-based social media data, Tencent User Density (TUD) data. The eigendecomposition approach was used to extract the effective principal components (PCs) to characterize the temporal patterns of human activities at building level. This was combined with k-means clustering for building function identification. The proposed method was applied to the study area of Tianhe district, Guangzhou, one of the largest cities in China. The building inference results were verified through the random sampling of AOI data and street views in Baidu Maps. The accuracy for all building clusters exceeded 83.00%. The results indicated that the eigendecomposition approach is effective for revealing the temporal structure inherent in human activities, and the proposed eigendecomposition-k-means clustering approach is reliable for building function identification based on social media data.

Smart De-Identification of Social Media Data

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathleen M. Carley ◽  
L. R. Carley ◽  
Jonathan Storrick
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Media Data

Mining Social Media Data to Study the Consequences of Dementia Diagnosis on Caregivers and Relatives (Preprint)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anika Oellrich ◽  
George Gkotsis ◽  
Richard James Butler Dobson ◽  
Tim JP Hubbard ◽  
Rina Dutta
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Family Relationships ◽  
Text Processing ◽  
Automated Analysis ◽  
Health Concern ◽  
Dementia Diagnosis ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Real Time Processing ◽  
Media Data

BACKGROUND Dementia is a growing public health concern with approximately 50 million people affected worldwide in 2017 and this number is expected to reach more than 131 million by 2050. The toll on caregivers and relatives cannot be underestimated as dementia changes family relationships, leaves people socially isolated, and affects the finances of all those involved. OBJECTIVE The aim of this study was to explore using automated analysis (i) the age and gender of people who post to the social media forum Reddit about dementia diagnoses, (ii) the affected person and their diagnosis, (iii) relevant subreddits authors are posting to, (iv) the types of messages posted and (v) the content of these posts. METHODS We analysed Reddit posts concerning dementia diagnoses. We used a previously developed text analysis pipeline to determine attributes of the posts as well as their authors to characterise online communications about dementia diagnoses. The posts were also examined by manual curation for the diagnosis provided and the person affected. Furthermore, we investigated the communities these people engage in and assessed the contents of the posts with an automated topic gathering technique. RESULTS Our results indicate that the majority of posters in our data set are women, and it is mostly close relatives such as parents and grandparents that are mentioned. Both the communities frequented and topics gathered reflect not only the sufferer's diagnosis but also potential outcomes, e.g. hardships experienced by the caregiver. The trends observed from this dataset are consistent with findings based on qualitative review, validating the robustness of social media automated text processing. CONCLUSIONS This work demonstrates the value of social media data sources as a resource for in-depth studies of those affected by a dementia diagnosis and the potential to develop novel support systems based on their real time processing in line with the increasing digitalisation of medical care.

Citizens, Elites, and Social Media Methodological Challenges and Opportunities in the Study of Persuasion and Mobilization

2019 ◽  
pp. 1036-1058
Author(s):  
Philip Habel ◽  
Yannis Theocharis
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Big Data ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Complete Understanding ◽  
Social Media Data ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Media Data

In the last decade, big data, and social media in particular, have seen increased popularity among citizens, organizations, politicians, and other elites—which in turn has created new and promising avenues for scholars studying long-standing questions of communication flows and influence. Studies of social media play a prominent role in our evolving understanding of the supply and demand sides of the political process, including the novel strategies adopted by elites to persuade and mobilize publics, as well as the ways in which citizens react, interact with elites and others, and utilize platforms to persuade audiences. While recognizing some challenges, this chapter speaks to the myriad of opportunities that social media data afford for evaluating questions of mobilization and persuasion, ultimately bringing us closer to a more complete understanding Lasswell’s (1948) famous maxim: “who, says what, in which channel, to whom, [and] with what effect.”

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