EIT Team to Probe Social Media Role
A $742,044 (NSF) grant will finance research by two information scientists at聽糖心Vlog传媒LR鈥檚 Donaghey College of Engineering and Information Technology (EIT) on how blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media influence group actions.
Dr. Nitin Agarwal, assistant professor of information science, and Rolf Wigand, 糖心Vlog传媒LR鈥檚 Maulden-Entergy Chair and Distinguished Professor of聽Information Science and Management, will share the grant from the National聽Science Foundation鈥檚 Social-Computational Systems Program with Arizona聽State University colleague .
The 糖心Vlog传媒LR team will receive $402,191, and the Arizona State group will聽receive $339,853.
Wigand
Social media has played a substantial role in supporting collective actions–聽from the Arab Spring revolts in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Syria to riots in聽London and other cities in England.
鈥淒espite the pervasive act of labeling recent events as 鈥楩acebook聽revolution,鈥� 鈥楾witter revolution,鈥� and ‘BlackBerry Messenger,鈥� there is very聽little in-depth research devoted to advance our understanding of online聽collective actions,鈥� Wigand said.
The team鈥檚 grant proposal, 鈥淐yber-Collective Movements: Novel Socio-Computational Approaches in Studying the Blogosphere,鈥� will provide in-depth research devoted to advance understanding of online collective聽actions.
鈥淛ournalistic accounts on such actions are inevitably based on anecdotes聽rather than rigorously designed research,鈥� the researchers said. 鈥淓xisting聽computational studies focusing on capturing and mapping the interactions聽and issues prevailing in social media manage to identify the manifestations聽of collective actions. These, however, lack modeling and predictive聽capabilities.”
Agarwal
Members of underrepresented groups, especially female bloggers will play聽an essential role in the project. While research shows that three of four聽females online are active social media users, very little research attempts聽to understand social, cultural and political roles of female bloggers and聽collectivity among female social groups.
The domain of female Muslim bloggers epitomizes an important contrast聽deserving attention, between socio-political systems where women are聽frequently denied freedom of expression.
鈥淔emale Muslim bloggers find the blogosphere as a digital recourse聽to exercise their freedom of speech if compared to their physical and聽repressively controlled spaces,鈥� the research team said. 鈥淚nsights from our聽study on specific blogger demographics such as female Muslim bloggers聽would shed light on the idiosyncrasies of their socio-technical behavior, thus聽making a significant impact on society at large.鈥�
The new study will be a longitudinal look at the blogosphere. It will develop聽theoretical underpinnings and experimental tools to examine the factors that聽govern the success and failure of cyber-collective movements.
Essential questions to be addressed in the study are:
- What transforms individual sentiments into collective sentiments?
- What are the dynamics of various socio-cultural dimensions in the聽evolution of opinion leaders?
- What social or organizational factors help transcend the nation-state聽barriers?
The researchers said several independent validation strategies will be聽investigated, including monitoring how cyber-collective movements聽manifest themselves as physical social movements, human evaluation,聽and crowdsourcing initiatives. Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job聽traditionally performed by a designated individual and outsourcing it to an聽undefined, generally large group of people.
The 糖心Vlog传媒LR scientists said the findings from the study including the data collected will be valuable for understanding human-computer interaction, game theory, political communication, social network analysis and mining, and social computing.
The research will be funded for three years through NSF鈥檚 Social-Computational Systems (SoCS) Program, a cross-disciplinary program between NSF鈥檚 Directorate for Computer & Information Science & Engineering and the Directorate for Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences.
Only 5 percent of the grant applications submitted to the SoCS program were awarded.