Cornelius Puschmann

Science blogging: an exploratory study of motives, styles, and audience reactions

This paper presents results from three studies on science blogging, the use of blogs for science communication. A survey addresses the views and motives of science bloggers, a first content analysis examines material published in science blogging platforms, while a second content analysis looks at reader responses to controversial issues covered in science blogs. Bloggers determine to a considerable degree which communicative function their blog can realize and how accessible it will be to non-experts Frequently readers are interested in adding their views to a post, a form of involvement which is in turn welcomed by the majority of bloggers.

Tweeting across hashtags: overlapping users and the importance of language, topics, and politics

In this paper we investigate the activity of 1 million users tweeting under 455 different hashtags related to a wide range of topics (political activism, health, technology, sports, Twitter-idioms). We find that 70% of users in the sample tweet across multiple information streams, frequently engaging in what could be described as serial activism. We furthermore determined the dominant language in each hashtag to trace which users overlap between the thematic and linguistic communities delineated by different information streams. Although social media is frequently assumed to bring together people of different nationalities and cultures to discuss a wide range of controversial issues, our results indicate that the underlying social network that connects hashtags through overlapping users is heavily limited to linguistic and content-oriented communities. Information streams are clustered around linguistic communities, and hashtags within the same language group are clustered around well-defined topics, such as health, entertainment and politics. The only information streams that transcend language barriers are activism-related hashtags, which cluster information streams in different languages. Contrasting with the assumption that social media acts as the enabler of a globalized public debate, our results indicate a linear relationship between users who are very active in political hashtags and users who tweet across multiple political hashtags. The results suggest that activist campaigns based on social media are driven by a relatively small number of highly-active, politically engaged users.

Chapter 9 Assessing the Impact of Online Academic Videos

Purpose – The web provides scholars with mechanisms to publish new types of outputs, including videos. Little is known about which scholarly videos are successful, however, and whether their impact can be measured to give appropriate credit to their creators. This article examines online academic videos to discover which types are popular and whether view counts could be used to judge their value. Methodology/approach – The study uses a content analysis of YouTube videos tweeted by academics: one random sample and one popular sample. Findings – The results show that the most popular videos produced by identifiable academics are those aimed at a general audience and which are edited rather than having a simple format. It seems that the audience for typical academic videos is so small that video production in most cases cannot be justified in terms of viewer numbers alone. Practical implications – For the typical scholar, videos should be produced for niche audiences to support other activities rather than as an end in themselves. For dissemination videos, in contrast, view counts can be used as a good indicator of failure or popularity, although translating popularity into impact is not straightforward.

How digital are the Digital Humanities? An analysis of two scholarly blogging platforms.

In this paper we compare two academic networking platforms, HASTAC and Hypotheses, to show the distinct ways in which they serve specific communities in the Digital Humanities (DH) in different national and disciplinary contexts. After providing background information on both platforms, we apply co-word analysis and topic modeling to show thematic similarities and differences between the two sites, focusing particularly on how they frame DH as a new paradigm in humanities research. We encounter a much higher ratio of posts using humanities-related terms compared to their digital counterparts, suggesting a one-way dependency of digital humanities-related terms on the corresponding unprefixed labels. The results also show that the terms digital archive, digital literacy, and digital pedagogy are relatively independent from the respective unprefixed terms, and that digital publishing, digital libraries, and digital media show considerable cross-pollination between the specialization and the general noun. The topic modeling reproduces these findings and reveals further differences between the two platforms. Our findings also indicate local differences in how the emerging field of DH is conceptualized and show dynamic topical shifts inside these respective contexts.

Informationsverbreitung in sozialen Medien

Die Weitergabe und Verbreitung von Informationen zahlen zu den beliebtesten Aktivitaten in den sozialen Medien. Zahlreiche Nutzungsoptionen (z. B. Posting, Sharing, Retweeting, Reblogging) ermoglichen das schnelle Teilen von Neuigkeiten in unterschiedlichen Formaten. Dabei erfullen Weitergabe und Verbreitung von Informationen fur die User wichtige soziale und kommunikative Funktionen, die uber den Kerneffekt der Informationsdiffusion haufig hinausgehen. In unserem Beitrag geben wir auf Basis aktueller Literatur einen Uberblick uber typische Erklarungsmodelle fur Informationsdiffusion einerseits und beschreiben andererseits Motive fur die Weitergabe und Verbreitung von Informationen in und mithilfe von sozialen Medien. Wir skizzieren zudem den Einfluss von Netzwerkstrukturen und Informationstypen auf und Barrieren bei der Informationsdiffusion.

Birds of a Feather Petition Together? Characterizing E-Petitioning Through the Lens of Platform Data

ABSTRACT E-petitioning platforms are increasingly popular in Western democracies and considered by some lawmakers and scholars to enhance citizen participation in political decision-making. In addition to social media and other channels for informal political communication, online petitioning is regarded as both a useful instrument to afford citizens a more important role in the political process and allow them to express support for issues which they find relevant. Building on existing pre-internet systems, e-petitioning websites are increasingly implemented to make it easier and faster to set up and sign petitions. However, little attention has so far been given to the relationship between different styles of usage and the causes supported by different groups of users. The functional difference between signing paper-based petitions vs. doing so online is especially notable with regard to users who sign large numbers of petitions. To characterize this relationship, we examine the intensity of user participation in the German Bundestag’s online petitioning platform through the lens of platform data collected over a period of five years, and conduct an analysis of highly active users and their political preferences. We find that users who sign just a single petition favor different policy areas than those who sign many petitions on a variety of issues. We conclude our analysis with observations on the potential of behavioral data for assessing the dynamics of online participation, and suggest that quantity (the number of signed petitions) and quality (favored policy areas) need more systematic joint assessment.