Donald J. Shoemaker

Social media use by government: From the routine to the critical

Abstract Social media and online services with user-generated content (e.g., Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) have made a staggering amount of information (and misinformation) available. Government officials seek to leverage these resources to improve services and communication with citizens. Significant potential exists to identify issues in real time, so emergency managers can monitor and respond to issues concerning public safety. Yet, the sheer volume of social data streams generates substantial noise that must be filtered in order to detect meaningful patterns and trends. Important events can then be identified as spikes in activity, while event meaning and consequences can be deciphered by tracking changes in content and public sentiment. This paper presents findings from a exploratory study we conducted between June and December 2010 with government officials in Arlington, VA (and the greater National Capitol Region around Washington, D.C.), with the broad goal of understanding social media use by government officials as well as community organizations, businesses, and the public at large. A key objective was also to understand social media use specifically for managing crisis situations from the routine (e.g., traffic, weather crises) to the critical (e.g., earthquakes, floods).

Social media use by government: from the routine to the critical

Social media (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) and other services with user-generated content have made a staggering amount of information (and misinformation) available. Government officials seek to leverage these resources to improve services and communication with citizens. Yet, the sheer volume of social data streams generates substantial noise that must be filtered. Nonetheless, potential exists to identify issues in real time, such that emergency management can monitor and respond to issues concerning public safety. By detecting meaningful patterns and trends in the stream of messages and information flow, events can be identified as spikes in activity, while meaning can be deciphered through changes in content. This paper presents findings from a pilot study we conducted between June and December 2010 with government officials in Arlington, Virginia (and the greater National Capitol Region around Washington, DC) with a view to understanding the use of social media by government officials as well as community organizations, businesses and the public. We are especially interested in understanding social media use in crisis situations (whether severe or fairly common, such as traffic or weather crises).

Twitter use during an emergency event: the case of the UT Austin shooting

This poster presents one of our efforts in the context of the Crisis, Tragedy, and Recovery Network (CTRnet) project. One topic studied in this project is the use of social media by government to respond to emergency events in towns and counties. Monitoring social media information for unusual behavior can help identify these events once we can characterize their patterns. As an example, we analyzed the campus shooting in the University of Texas, Austin, on September 28, 2010. In order to study the pattern of communication and the information communicated using social media on that day, we collected publicly available data from Twitter. Collected tweets were analyzed and visualized using the Natural Language Toolkit, word clouds, and graphs. They showed how news and posts related to this event swamped the discussions of other issues.

The subculture of violence and ethnicity

Abstract Using data from the General Social Surveys, this article examines the subculture of violence thesis as it relates to three ethnic groups—blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians. The data suggest that blacks and American Indians have had more violence experiences (hitting and firearms) than have the general population. Contrary to what would be predicted from the thesis, the data indicate that blacks and Hispanics had lower tolerance of violence than the general population. Only American Indians, on all factors considered, appeared to support the thesis. Even this support, however, took on less significance when regression results were examined. Demographic and residential variables explained more of the variance in violence tolerance and experiences with violence than did ethnic background. These findings suggest that the influence of ethnicity on the subculture of violence is minor and indirect.

Gun Ownership and Carrying: Comparison of Protective and Subcultural Correlates:

Data from 1046 respondents in Virginia suggest subcultural, as compared to protective, motivations for possession of and carrying guns.

Nonverbal Images of Criminality and Deviance: Existence and Consequence

This paper reviews the literature relating physical appearance to perceptions of criminality or deviance. The content focuses on characteristics of the perceived but includes some data relative to the influence ofperceiver characteristics in the perception process. Methodological procedures are analyzed along with the subject matter of the literature reviewed. The research settings of studies range from college classrooms to juvenile reformatories. The paper concludes with a discussion of future research directions and implications of the existing research for visual identification procedures utilized in police and court settings. One suggestion which emerges from this literature review, for example, is to monitor police lineups and other identification procedures to help offset the influence of physical appearance on the identification process.

CTRnet DL for disaster information services

We describe our work in collecting, analyzing and visualizing online information (e.g., Web documents, images, tweets), which are to be maintained by the Crisis, Tragedy and Recovery Network (CTRnet) digital library. We have been collecting resources about disaster events, as well as campus and other major shooting events, in collaboration with the Internet Archive (IA). Social media data (e.g., tweets, Facebook data) also have been collected and analyzed. Analyzed results are visualized using graphs and tag clouds. Exploratory content-based image retrieval has been applied in one of our image collections. We explain our CTR ontology development methodology and collaboration with Arlington County, VA and IBM, in a Center for Community Security and Resilience funded project.

Actor, situation, and context: A framework for delinquency theory integration

Survey data are presented and discussed as they relate to juvenile involvement in serious and violent delinquency. Juveniles confined in two detention centers were administered self-report questionnaires (n=127). An integrated model that combines social structural variables (i.e., neighborhood disorganization and strain) with social process variables (i.e., parental control, social bond, and delinquent peer associations) was tested by way of path analysis. The data generally support the integrated model, explaining as much as 44% of the variance. Two variables, delinquent peer associations and an overall social bond indicator, directly and significantly predict serious delinquent behavior. Delinquent peer associations are significantly related to neighborhood disorganization, while the social bond is significantly related to parental control and strain. Thus, the data support a systems approach to explaining delinquent behavior, where social structural variables affect social process variables.

The duality of juvenile justice in the United States: History, trends, and prospects

Juvenile justice in America was formulated from the dual philosophies of punishment and treatment. The duality is still evident and is manifested in both increased legalization of the juvenile court and the use of diversion from the court. The punitive societal attitude toward juveniles, now prevalent, is predicted to change, partly in response to an expected decline in delinquency over the next several years and to a public awareness of the economic costs of a punitive policy. Generally, moreover, the system and societal response are seen as gradually moving in the direction of treatment for juvenile delinquency.

A Digital Library for Recovery, Research, and Learning From April 16, 2007, at Virginia Tech:

The authors are developing a digital library to help during the long-term recovery from the mass shooting on April 16, 2007 at Virginia Tech. Content comes from uploaded texts, images, videos, and other files, as well as pages crawled from the Web and information collected, with permission, from those working with Web 2.0 sites such as Facebook and Flickr. The authors are applying data/text mining, social network analysis, and information visualization methods to facilitate systems science, providing key added-value services, especially to social and behavioral scientists seeking faster and easier ways to analyze, model, understand, and test hypotheses. The article also considers how technologies influence communications. The authors aim to support the university, local community, region, nation, and the world, as it seeks to learn from a tragic event. Language: en