Political campaigns have a temporal nature, which means that the strategic environment shapes the... more Political campaigns have a temporal nature, which means that the strategic environment shapes the nature of candidate communication, especially the stages of campaigning—from surfacing to the general election. As social media platforms have matured and political campaigns have normalized their use of those platforms in this decade, this study examines the 2016 and 2020 US presidential campaign communication on Facebook and Twitter using data from the Illuminating project at Syracuse University. Our objective is to explore how the stages of the campaign cycle shape political communication. We also explore social media platforms as additional factors. Moreover, given the distinct and anti-normative communication style of Donald Trump, we examine whether his communication is an outlier relative to his competition in the primaries and the general election, and while a challenger in 2016 and an incumbent in 2020. Our results suggest that campaign messaging changes over the stages of the ...
With candidates using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as part of their campaign stra... more With candidates using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as part of their campaign strategies, social scientists are trying to understand the diffusion of political messages. Viral events can spread messages fast and far from the source, bringing candidate’s messages to new audiences and bringing new followers to candidates [4]. To date, no studies have focused on understanding specifically what kinds of political issues the public spreads into their own networks. While the kinds of issues that spread will likely change from election to election, this work provides a comparison point for future work and is the first step in more real-time analysis that could be useful for researchers, journalists, and politicians. For this poster abstract we highlight part of our analysis, specifically, the frequency with which presidential candidates tweeted about specific issues and how the public responded by retweeting. To accomplish this, we use data visualization for exploratory data...
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, 2018
This paper provides an introduction to the 2018 Proceedings of the International Conference on So... more This paper provides an introduction to the 2018 Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Media and Society (#SMSociety). The conference is an annual gathering of leading social media researchers, policy makers, and practitioners from around the world. Now in its 9th year, the 2018 conference is hosted by the Centre for Business Data Analytics at the Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark. The Proceedings features a total of 60 papers, including both full and work-in-progress papers (the acceptance rate for 2018 is 43%).
Metadata in scientific data repositories such as GenBank contain links between data submissions a... more Metadata in scientific data repositories such as GenBank contain links between data submissions and related publications. As a new data source for studying collaboration networks, metadata in data repositories compensate for the limitations of publication-based research on collaboration networks. This paper reports the findings from a GenBank metadata analytics project. We used network science methods to uncover the structures and dynamics of GenBank collaboration networks from 1992–2018. The longitudinality and large scale of this data collection allowed us to unravel the evolution history of collaboration networks and identify the trend of flattening network structures over time and optimal assortative mixing range for enhancing collaboration capacity. By incorporating metadata from the data production stage with the publication stage, we uncovered new characteristics of collaboration networks as well as developed new metrics for assessing the effectiveness of enablers of collabor...
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society, 2017
The use of digital technologies by political campaigns has been a topic of scholarly concern for ... more The use of digital technologies by political campaigns has been a topic of scholarly concern for over two decades. However, these studies have been mostly focused on analyzing the use of digital platforms without considering contextual factors of the race, like public opinion polling data. Polling data is an important information source for both citizens and candidates, and provides the latter with information that might drive strategic communication. In this paper, we explore the relationship between the use of social media in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections and candidates' standing in public opinion polls focusing on the surfacing and primary stages of the campaign. We are also interested in understanding whether candidates use Twitter and Facebook in similar ways. We used automated content analysis to categorize social media posts from all 21 Republican and Democratic candidates that ran for president in 2016. Specifically, we are interested in observing whether a candid...
STACKS is an extensible social media research toolkit designed to collect, process, and store dat... more STACKS is an extensible social media research toolkit designed to collect, process, and store data from online social networks. The toolkit is an ongoing project via the Syracuse University iSchool, and currently supports the Twitter Streaming API.
Societies rely on the social infrastructure for proper societal function. When crises emerge, the... more Societies rely on the social infrastructure for proper societal function. When crises emerge, the importance of the social infrastructure magnifies as people often rely on others, both known and unknown, for support. For citizens experiencing a war environment, however, societal trust can be affected and we show how technologies are used to maintain and create social infrastructures for resilience. Through interviews with 45 Iraqi civilians who had lived through the 2 nd Gulf War, we found that people were able to evoke the social infrastructure through technological resources to maintain practices for work, to obtain goods and services, and to receive contextual support. We then theorize properties of social infrastructure that could be developed into affordances for new technologies to promote resilience during crises.
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society - #SMSociety17, 2017
Twitter allows political candidates to broadcast messages directly to the public, some of which s... more Twitter allows political candidates to broadcast messages directly to the public, some of which spread virally and potentially reach new audiences and supporters. During the 2014 U.S. gubernatorial election, 74 candidates posted 20,580 tweets, of which, 10,946 were retweeted a total of 139,315 times. Using content analysis, automated classification and regression analysis, we show that actors with different levels of network influence tend to promote different types of election content, but that the convergence of their choices and actions lead to information flows that reach the largest audiences. We also show that actors with middle-level influence, in terms of the number of followers they have, tend to be the most influential in the diffusion process. Our work provides empirical support for the theoretical framework of negotiated diffusion, which suggests that information flows are the result of the convergence of top-down forces (structures and powerful gatekeepers) and bottom-up forces (collective sharing of actors with varying degrees of influence).
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society - #SMSociety17, 2017
In this paper, we introduce a lexicon-based method for identifying political topics in social med... more In this paper, we introduce a lexicon-based method for identifying political topics in social media messages. After discussing several critical shortcomings of unsupervised topic identification for this task, we describe the lexicon-based approach. We test our lexicon on candidate-generated campaign messages on Facebook and Twitter in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The results show that this approach provides reliable results for eight of nine political topic categories. In closing, we describe steps to improve our approach and how it can be used for future research on political topics in social media messages.
Political campaign scholars have been concerned about the nature and effects of negative messages... more Political campaign scholars have been concerned about the nature and effects of negative messages. Although much research has examined attack advertisements in broadcast media, more research is needed to understand attack messaging on social media. We conducted a content analysis of campaign tweets generated by candidates who ran for governor in 2014 in the United States. We examine the variables that relate to campaign attack message posting and predict its spread. Analysis suggests challengers are more likely to attack, but incumbent-generated messages are more likely to spread. We also found that attack messages are more likely than advocacy messages to be retweeted.
While virality is a much-studied topic on popular social media sites, it has been rarely explored... more While virality is a much-studied topic on popular social media sites, it has been rarely explored on sites like Dribbble, a social networking site for artists and designers. Using a mixed-method approach, we explore virality from a user-centric perspective. Interviews with informants confirm that viral-like events do exist on Dribbble, though what spreads are stylistic choices. While what spreads is different than on other platforms, our work suggests that the mechanics that drive these events are similar, suggesting an underlying social phenomenon that is reflected in different ways on different platforms. Our results are supported by regression modeling using variables identified by our informants. Our work contributes to social media studies since smaller sites like Dribbble are rarely studied, particularly using mixed methods approaches, as well as to the body of research around information diffusion and viral events.
Political campaigns have a temporal nature, which means that the strategic environment shapes the... more Political campaigns have a temporal nature, which means that the strategic environment shapes the nature of candidate communication, especially the stages of campaigning—from surfacing to the general election. As social media platforms have matured and political campaigns have normalized their use of those platforms in this decade, this study examines the 2016 and 2020 US presidential campaign communication on Facebook and Twitter using data from the Illuminating project at Syracuse University. Our objective is to explore how the stages of the campaign cycle shape political communication. We also explore social media platforms as additional factors. Moreover, given the distinct and anti-normative communication style of Donald Trump, we examine whether his communication is an outlier relative to his competition in the primaries and the general election, and while a challenger in 2016 and an incumbent in 2020. Our results suggest that campaign messaging changes over the stages of the ...
With candidates using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as part of their campaign stra... more With candidates using social media sites like Facebook and Twitter as part of their campaign strategies, social scientists are trying to understand the diffusion of political messages. Viral events can spread messages fast and far from the source, bringing candidate’s messages to new audiences and bringing new followers to candidates [4]. To date, no studies have focused on understanding specifically what kinds of political issues the public spreads into their own networks. While the kinds of issues that spread will likely change from election to election, this work provides a comparison point for future work and is the first step in more real-time analysis that could be useful for researchers, journalists, and politicians. For this poster abstract we highlight part of our analysis, specifically, the frequency with which presidential candidates tweeted about specific issues and how the public responded by retweeting. To accomplish this, we use data visualization for exploratory data...
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Media and Society, 2018
This paper provides an introduction to the 2018 Proceedings of the International Conference on So... more This paper provides an introduction to the 2018 Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Media and Society (#SMSociety). The conference is an annual gathering of leading social media researchers, policy makers, and practitioners from around the world. Now in its 9th year, the 2018 conference is hosted by the Centre for Business Data Analytics at the Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark. The Proceedings features a total of 60 papers, including both full and work-in-progress papers (the acceptance rate for 2018 is 43%).
Metadata in scientific data repositories such as GenBank contain links between data submissions a... more Metadata in scientific data repositories such as GenBank contain links between data submissions and related publications. As a new data source for studying collaboration networks, metadata in data repositories compensate for the limitations of publication-based research on collaboration networks. This paper reports the findings from a GenBank metadata analytics project. We used network science methods to uncover the structures and dynamics of GenBank collaboration networks from 1992–2018. The longitudinality and large scale of this data collection allowed us to unravel the evolution history of collaboration networks and identify the trend of flattening network structures over time and optimal assortative mixing range for enhancing collaboration capacity. By incorporating metadata from the data production stage with the publication stage, we uncovered new characteristics of collaboration networks as well as developed new metrics for assessing the effectiveness of enablers of collabor...
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society, 2017
The use of digital technologies by political campaigns has been a topic of scholarly concern for ... more The use of digital technologies by political campaigns has been a topic of scholarly concern for over two decades. However, these studies have been mostly focused on analyzing the use of digital platforms without considering contextual factors of the race, like public opinion polling data. Polling data is an important information source for both citizens and candidates, and provides the latter with information that might drive strategic communication. In this paper, we explore the relationship between the use of social media in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Elections and candidates' standing in public opinion polls focusing on the surfacing and primary stages of the campaign. We are also interested in understanding whether candidates use Twitter and Facebook in similar ways. We used automated content analysis to categorize social media posts from all 21 Republican and Democratic candidates that ran for president in 2016. Specifically, we are interested in observing whether a candid...
STACKS is an extensible social media research toolkit designed to collect, process, and store dat... more STACKS is an extensible social media research toolkit designed to collect, process, and store data from online social networks. The toolkit is an ongoing project via the Syracuse University iSchool, and currently supports the Twitter Streaming API.
Societies rely on the social infrastructure for proper societal function. When crises emerge, the... more Societies rely on the social infrastructure for proper societal function. When crises emerge, the importance of the social infrastructure magnifies as people often rely on others, both known and unknown, for support. For citizens experiencing a war environment, however, societal trust can be affected and we show how technologies are used to maintain and create social infrastructures for resilience. Through interviews with 45 Iraqi civilians who had lived through the 2 nd Gulf War, we found that people were able to evoke the social infrastructure through technological resources to maintain practices for work, to obtain goods and services, and to receive contextual support. We then theorize properties of social infrastructure that could be developed into affordances for new technologies to promote resilience during crises.
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society - #SMSociety17, 2017
Twitter allows political candidates to broadcast messages directly to the public, some of which s... more Twitter allows political candidates to broadcast messages directly to the public, some of which spread virally and potentially reach new audiences and supporters. During the 2014 U.S. gubernatorial election, 74 candidates posted 20,580 tweets, of which, 10,946 were retweeted a total of 139,315 times. Using content analysis, automated classification and regression analysis, we show that actors with different levels of network influence tend to promote different types of election content, but that the convergence of their choices and actions lead to information flows that reach the largest audiences. We also show that actors with middle-level influence, in terms of the number of followers they have, tend to be the most influential in the diffusion process. Our work provides empirical support for the theoretical framework of negotiated diffusion, which suggests that information flows are the result of the convergence of top-down forces (structures and powerful gatekeepers) and bottom-up forces (collective sharing of actors with varying degrees of influence).
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Social Media & Society - #SMSociety17, 2017
In this paper, we introduce a lexicon-based method for identifying political topics in social med... more In this paper, we introduce a lexicon-based method for identifying political topics in social media messages. After discussing several critical shortcomings of unsupervised topic identification for this task, we describe the lexicon-based approach. We test our lexicon on candidate-generated campaign messages on Facebook and Twitter in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The results show that this approach provides reliable results for eight of nine political topic categories. In closing, we describe steps to improve our approach and how it can be used for future research on political topics in social media messages.
Political campaign scholars have been concerned about the nature and effects of negative messages... more Political campaign scholars have been concerned about the nature and effects of negative messages. Although much research has examined attack advertisements in broadcast media, more research is needed to understand attack messaging on social media. We conducted a content analysis of campaign tweets generated by candidates who ran for governor in 2014 in the United States. We examine the variables that relate to campaign attack message posting and predict its spread. Analysis suggests challengers are more likely to attack, but incumbent-generated messages are more likely to spread. We also found that attack messages are more likely than advocacy messages to be retweeted.
While virality is a much-studied topic on popular social media sites, it has been rarely explored... more While virality is a much-studied topic on popular social media sites, it has been rarely explored on sites like Dribbble, a social networking site for artists and designers. Using a mixed-method approach, we explore virality from a user-centric perspective. Interviews with informants confirm that viral-like events do exist on Dribbble, though what spreads are stylistic choices. While what spreads is different than on other platforms, our work suggests that the mechanics that drive these events are similar, suggesting an underlying social phenomenon that is reflected in different ways on different platforms. Our results are supported by regression modeling using variables identified by our informants. Our work contributes to social media studies since smaller sites like Dribbble are rarely studied, particularly using mixed methods approaches, as well as to the body of research around information diffusion and viral events.
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Papers by Jeff Hemsley