Jeff Hemsley

Knowledge and Knowledge Management in the Social Media Age

Social media comprise the set of tools identified as blogs, wikis, and other social networking platforms that “enable people to connect, communicate, and collaborate.” These tools create a dynamic, complex information infrastructure that enables easier, faster, and more widespread sharing of information. These affordances make possible phenomena such as viral processes, and they can change how we are able to work and organize. This article explores the impact of this emerging knowledge ecosystem (KE) on some prominent characteristics of knowledge and knowledge management (KM) models through an exploratory critical review of popular epistemological perspectives and conceptual foundations underlying KM models. We find that this emerging KE requires a revisiting of both the social aspects of knowledge creation and some popular notions of enterprise knowledge management.

Democracy.com: A Tale of Political Blogs and Content

The debate about the role of political blogs in politics generally and its effect on democracy and participation in particular has deepened since the 2008 U.S. presidential election. While some studies warn that the Internet may undermine deliberation, and replicate patterns of homophily and polarization among blogs with the same political inclination, other studies emphasize the potential of the Internet to strengthen cross-ideological discourse and participation. This paper suggests, using a hybrid theoretical framework which acknowledges homophily and the power law distribution among political blogs, and at the same time exhibits the use of the Internet also as a cross-participation platform and as strengthening participation. For that purpose, this paper looks at 83 videos that went viral during the 2008 election and examines patterns of behavior of the top 50 political blogs (conservative and liberal) in respect these videos over a period of two years.

Homophily in the Guise of Cross-Linking Political Blogs and Content

This study examines the behavior of influential political blogs (conservative and liberal) in reference to external viral content during March 2007 and June 2009. We analyze homophily and cross-ideological (heterophily) practices. We propose a multidimensional model that employs both qualitative and quantitative methods for examining homophily behaviors by looking at three dimensions: blog-to-blog, blog-to-video, blog post-to-video. Findings show that while homophily patterns prevail, some limited occurrences of cross-ideological practices exist. The cross-linking practices may include deliberative motives, but in essence they are not created for the purposes of discourse. Instead, these cross-linking practices strengthen previously held political stances of the users who create them and negatively portray and reframe content of alternative views. This represents homophily in the guise of cross-linking.

Information flows in events of political unrest

Social media, as the set of tools typified by blogs and other social networking platforms, is creating a user-generated dynamic, complex information ecosystem. The flow of information across multiple platforms means that traditional media gatekeepers (newspapers and other ‘mainstream media’) become just one of many pathways by which we learn about and make sense of new information. This research note reports preliminary results of a study based on a dataset of more than 65 million tweets related to the Occupy Wall Street movement, coupled with searches of LexisNexis, to examine information about six events related to Occupy sites in Maine, New York City, Oakland, and the University of California Davis. The study seeks to understand the relationships among newspapers, blogs, and Twitter as users of each platform report and comment on these events. The preliminary results suggest that the platforms perform distinct but overlapping roles at different periods in the information diffusion life cycle.

Understanding Discourse Acts: Political Campaign Messages Classification on Facebook and Twitter

To understand political campaign messages in depth, we developed automated classification models for classifying categories of political campaign Twitter and Facebook messages, such as calls-to-action and persuasive messages. We used 2014 U.S. governor’s campaign social media messages to develop models, then tested these models on a randomly selected 2016 U.S. presidential campaign social media dataset. Our classifiers reach .75 micro-averaged F value on training sets and .76 micro-averaged F value on test sets, suggesting that the models can be applied to classify English-language political campaign social media messages. Our study also suggests that features afforded by social media help improve classification performance in social media documents.

Occupied with Place: Exploring Twitter Resistance Networks

From Tehran Square to Gezi Park, Twitter is an emergent tactic of protestors in the public square. Our work utilizes the theoretical framework of contentious politics and its human geographic extension as a framework for examining the role of “place” in Twitter-based networks of resistance. We examine Twitter traffic about local instantiations of Occupy Wall Street across eight cities. The study addresses mutual communications between Twitter participants in hashtags related to each of these local instantiations. This work explores the role of place as a constitutive component of these networks. To do so, we employ descriptive statistical and chi-square tests to examine the significance of user-defined metadata regarding place to the exchanges between users within a network. We conclude that place matters and point to future directions in computational and traditional qualitative analysis, spatial-temporal studies of social media, and the effects of locational propinquity for network development.

Exploring AAPI Identity Online: Political Ideology as a Factor Affecting Identity Work on Reddit

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are often perceived as a monolithic group, despite their distinct composition of ethnic cultures, political ideologies, and socioeconomic backgrounds. AAPIs increasingly engage in online forums to disclose their experiences and opinions, and in doing so, take part in lengthy discussions that shape the views of their community. We retrieved over 72,000 Reddit comments posted between January to July 2016 for a mixed-methods study of AAPI identity work, analyzing discursive patterns of user-deleted and banned comments. We found that while conservative AAPIs tend to comment anonymously more frequently, progressive AAPIs are less likely to ban comments that did not fit the behavior and norms of their community. AAPI redditors engage differently between conservative and progressive online communities through a process of what we conceptualize as identity work as deliberation.

A vision for information visualization in information science

This paper presents the case for Information Visualization (IV) to be a central, integrated component of study in Information Science. We summarize the current state of IV within iSchools, the market demand for IV skills, the intellectual contributions of IV to the field of Information Science and the potential intellectual contributions of Information Science to the field of IV. We conclude with three, non-exclusive scenarios for the inclusion of IV into the iSchool curriculum as first steps toward realizing this: integration throughout the curriculum, a core course, and a specialization tract.

Call to Retweet: Negotiated Diffusion of Strategic Political Messages

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).

Retweets for Policy Advocates: Tweet Diffusion in The Policy Discussion Space of Universal Basic Income

Technological advances have increasingly automated tasks that have hitherto been done by humans. The disruption to the labor market is expected to grow as more and more jobs are lost to automation. Society would benefit from the open discussion of alternative policy approaches, such as Universal Basic Income (UBI), that can alleviate social tensions related to joblessness. In this study, we examine tweets related to the discussion of UBI in an effort to understand the types of messages most likely to spread information about policy innovations, and most likely to bring new voices into the discussion. We find that messages that resonate with users are more likely to reach new audiences and bring new actors into the discussion space. Our work offers prescriptions for policy advocates, and provides insights for social scientists studying Twitter and policy and information diffusion.