Social media platforms such as Twitter/X are increasingly important for political communication but the empirical question as to whether such communication enhances democratic consensus building (the ...ideal of deliberative democracy) or instead contributes to societal polarisation via fostering of hate speech and “information disorders” such as echo chambers is worth exploring. Political deliberation involves reciprocal communication between users, but much of the recent research into politics on social media has focused on one-to-many communication, in particular the sharing and diffusion of information on Twitter via retweets. This paper presents a new approach to studying reciprocal political communication on Twitter, with a focus on extending network-analytic indicators of deliberation. We use the Twitter v2 API to collect a new dataset (#debatenight2020) of reciprocal communication on Twitter during the first debate of the 2020 US presidential election and show that a hashtag-based collection alone would have collected only 1% of the debate-related communication. Previous work into using social network analysis to measure deliberation has involved using discussion tree networks to quantify the extent of argumentation (maximum depth) and representation (maximum width); we extend these measures by explicitly incorporating reciprocal communication (via triad census) and the political partisanship of users (inferred via usage of partisan hashtags). Using these methods, we find evidence for reciprocal communication among partisan actors, but also point to a need for further research to understand what forms this communication takes.
Five teacher educators discuss children's literature addressing Earth's changing climate. They present tools for evaluating the quality of resources likely to help teachers and students stimulate ...conceptual and emotional development rather than anxiety or oversimplification. An annotated selection of current books along with a checklist to evaluate children's literature oriented toward issues of climate change is presented to help teachers choose appropriate literature for facilitating students' development of scientifically, socially, and ecologically responsible thinking and decision-making.
Web Social Science Ackland, Robert
2013, 2013-06-30, 2013-06-17, 20130101
eBook
Explaining how the Web is a socially constructed phenomenon, this timely text provides readers with a complete theoretical and practical guide to Web Social Science.
In this paper, we investigate the relational architecture of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) focussing on the individuals that, in the thirty years of its existence, have assured ...the connection between its different components. To study relational bridging within the IPCC, we created a unique database of all the individuals who have contributed to the organisation since its establishment and noted in which workstream they participated (i.e., function + Working Group + Assessment Report). From this database we extract the participants-workstreams affiliation network and use it to compute several metrics of bridgeness, which we discuss, validate, and compare. We use these metrics to investigate the general distribution and evolution of bridging in the IPCC, but also to identify individuals who more actively provided connections between its authors and government representatives (functional bridges), its Working Groups (thematic bridges) and its assessment cycles (temporal bridges). Focussing on the role of key bridge individuals and their trajectories within the organisation, we provide insights on the IPCC as a network organisation.
•The paper is based on an original dataset of more than 8000 individuals who have contributed to the IPCC since 1988.•The paper investigates the individuals who have contributed to keeping together the different components of the IPCC.•The paper identifies temporal, thematic and functional bridge individuals and qualitatively analyses their career in the IPCC.
Social network services such as Facebook provide new data for social science research into, for example, the role of individual characteristics in friendship formation and the diffusion of tastes in ...social networks. This article assesses the potential of social network services for social science research in two ways. First, it is argued that social scientists conduct hyperlink analysis differently to applied physicists and researchers from the library and information sciences, and face constraints (relating to theory, methods and availability of appropriate tools) that are not encountered in the other disciplinary approaches. However, the constraints regarding theory and methods are less likely to be faced by researchers of online social networks, and for this reason, the rise of Facebook and other similar services is a potential boon for empirical social scientists interested in networks. The second part of the article focuses specifically on the availability of research tools, and it is argued that social network services may eventually serve as e-Research platforms for delivering social network analysis tools.
The political blogosphere has become the focus of attention of researchers from disciplines such as political science and network science. In a recent paper, Adamic and Glance (LinkKDD ’05: ...Proceedings of the 3rd international workshop on link discovery, 2005, pp. 443–452) report differences between the linking behavior of politically conservative versus politically liberal web bloggers. We construct a simple agent-based network formation model which shows that one such difference, demonstrating what we term ‘political homophily’, can be generated by connecting the blogosphere to the underlying population distribution of political preferences. The model is implemented as a web service in the e-Research tool VOSON (Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks), and both model and tool serve to define a natural environment for research into link formation behavior with large numbers of heterogeneous network participants.
Social movements are making extensive communicative and organizational use of the Internet in order to identify social problems and bring about change. We present a model of an online social ...movement, where actors exchange practical and symbolic resources through hyperlink and online frame networks. Our positioning of these exchanges within a continuum of conscious and unconscious expressive behavior informs our framework for the empirical analysis of online collectives. An application using data collected from the websites of over 160 environmental activist organizations reveals significant fragmentation in this field of contentious activity, which we suggest reflects offline social divisions.
We examine why some relationships are more important than others, using a multilevel statistical model and data on personal networks of Australians 50 years and older, collected via a purpose-built ...Facebook application. While the network data were collected automatically, participants in our study provided data on the importance of their relationships, measured by perceived closeness and access to resources. We find that the information on how network members are connected with each other (network structure) provides powerful insights into what makes a relationship important. When importance is measured by closeness of relationship, important alters are kin, and are alters who are highly connected with others or act as bridges between different groups. When importance is measured by access to resources, important alters are those who act as bridges and are in more densely-knit networks. We discuss our findings in a broader context of research into important relationships in later life, and collecting personal network data via online social networks.
PDF
