Information‐centered research for large‐scale analyses of new information sources

Wilkinson

2009

Self Cite

Social network sites (SNSs) such as MySpace and Facebook are important venues for interpersonal communication, especially among youth. One way in which members can communicate is to write public messages on each other's profile, but how is this unusual means of communication used in practice? An analysis of 2,293 public comment exchanges extracted from large samples of U.S. and U.K. MySpace members found them to be relatively rapid, but rarely used for prolonged exchanges. They seem to fulfill two purposes: making initial contact and keeping in touch occasionally such as at birthdays and other important dates. Although about half of the dialogs seem to exchange some gossip, the dialogs seem typically too short to play the role of gossip-based "social grooming" for typical pairs of Friends, but close Friends may still communicate extensively in SNSs with other methods.

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Research Questionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Public dialogs in social network sites: What is their purpose?

Wilkinson

2009

Self Cite

“…The current study refines the methods of the previous research and analyses more factors in a large systematic sample. The objectives are information-centered (Thelwall, Wouters, & Fry, 2008): to develop and demonstrate effective methods for identifying homophily within MySpace friendship, to provide initial exploratory findings, and to highlight promising directions for future research. This article is therefore an explicitly information science contribution to a problem that is of most interest to researchers outside of information science so that those researchers can use the findings to inform their own work.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Homophily in MySpace

2008

Self Cite

151

Social network sites like MySpace are increasingly important environments for expressing and maintaining interpersonal connections, but does online communication exacerbate or ameliorate the known tendency for offline friendships to form between similar people (homophily)? This article reports an exploratory study of the similarity between the reported attributes of pairs of active MySpace Friends based upon a systematic sample of 2,567 members joining on June 18, 2007 and Friends who commented on their profile. The results showed no evidence of gender homophily but significant evidence of homophily for ethnicity, religion, age, country, marital status, attitude towards children, sexual orientation, and reason for joining MySpace. There were also some imbalances: women and the young were disproportionately commenters, and commenters tended to have more Friends than commentees. Overall, it seems that although traditional sources of homophily are thriving in MySpace networks of active public connections, gender homophily has completely disappeared. Finally, the method used has wide potential for investigating and partially tracking homophily in society, providing early warning of socially divisive trends.

“…Social networking, blogging and online forums have turned the web into a vast repository of comments on many topics, generating a potential source of information for social science research (Thelwall, Wouters, & Fry, 2008). The availability of large scale electronic social data from the web and elsewhere is already transforming social research (Savage & Burrows, 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sentiment in Twitter events

Buckley

Paltoglou

2010

Self Cite

661

433

The microblogging site Twitter generates a constant stream of communication, some of which concerns events of general interest. An analysis of Twitter may, therefore, give insights into why particular events resonate with the population. This article reports a study of a month of English Twitter posts, assessing whether popular events are typically associated with increases in sentiment strength, as seems intuitively likely. Using the top 30 events, determined by a measure of relative increase in (general) term usage, the results give strong evidence that popular events are normally associated with increases in negative sentiment strength and some evidence that peaks of interest in events have stronger positive sentiment than the time before the peak. It seems that many positive events, such as the Oscars, are capable of generating increased negative sentiment in reaction to them. Nevertheless, the surprisingly small average change in sentiment associated with popular events (typically 1% and only 6% for Tiger Woods' confessions) is consistent with events affording posters opportunities to satisfy preexisting personal goals more often than eliciting instinctive reactions.