Ravi Vatrapu

Online Video “Friends” Social Networking: Overlapping Online Public Spheres in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election

ABSTRACT This article examines the links to YouTube from the Facebook “walls” of the three major candidates in the 2008 U.S. Presidential election. User-generated linkage patterns show how participants in these politically related social networking dialogs used online video to make their points. We show how different types of individuals inhabit these overlapping public spheres and how they provide structure and interpretive information for others. Civic life is becoming more sociotechnical, and will therefore involve engagements with ideas as they are constructed by others out of disparate information sources and their interlinkages.

Understanding Social Business

“Social business” refers to the utilization of online social channels to conduct business. This chapter situates the notion of social business in the relevant macro trends in technology, business, and society and discusses the three critical aspects of social business: social business engagement, social media analytics, and social media management. Social media engagement concerns the organization’s strategic use of social media channels to interact with its internal and external stakeholders for purposes ranging from knowledge management to corporate social responsibility and marketing. Social media analytics refers to the collection, storage, analysis, and reporting of social data emanating from the social media engagement of and social media conversations about the organization. Social media management focusses on the operational issues, managerial challenges, and comparative advantages with respect to the emerging paradigm of social business. This chapter concludes with a proposal for a large-scale collaborative research project on socially connected organizations and articulates a set of research questions, anticipated scientific advancements, and societal benefits.

Explaining culture: an outline of a theory of socio-technical interactions

This paper presents four criticisms of positivistic research in cross-cultural human-computer interactions. An outline of a theory of cultural influences in socio-technical systems is then presented. Based on the ecological approach to perception and action and the philosophical approach to intersubjectivity, the dual aspects of interaction in socio-technical systems- (a) interacting with technologies and (b) interacting with social others using technologies are respectively theorized as (a) perception and appropriation of affordances and (b) structures and functions of intersubjetcivity. Affordances are action-taking possibilities and meaning-making opportunities in a socio-technical system relative to actor competencies and system capabilities. Technological intersubjectivity refers to the production, projection and performance of identities and subjectivities in technology supported social relationships. The comparative informatics methodological framework is then presented followed by a brief description of the experimental evaluation of the theoretical framework. Implications for design of computer supported intercultural collaboration systems and a set of open research questions are discussed.

A framework for eclectic analysis of collaborative interaction

The interactional structure of learning practices is a central focus of study for CSCL, although challenges remain in developing and pursuing a systematic research agenda in the field. Different analytic approaches produce complementary insights, but comparison is hampered by incompatible representations of the object of study. Sequential interaction analysis is promising but must be scaled to distributed and asynchronously mediated settings. Building on recent analytic work within our laboratory, we propose a framework for analysis that is founded on the concepts of media coordinations and uptake, and utilizes an abstract transcript representation, the dependency graph, that is suitable for use by multiple analytical traditions and supports examination of sequential structure at larger scales.

Predicting iPhone Sales from iPhone Tweets

Recent research in the field of computational social science have shown how data resulting from the widespread adoption and use of social media channels such as twitter can be used to predict outcomes such as movie revenues, election winners, localized moods, and epidemic outbreaks. Underlying assumptions for this research stream on predictive analytics are that social media actions such as tweeting, liking, commenting and rating are proxies for user/consumers attention to a particular object/product and that the shared digital artefact that is persistent can create social influence. In this paper, we demonstrate how social media data from twitter can be used to predict the sales of iPhones. Based on a conceptual model of social data consisting of social graph (actors, actions, activities, and artefacts) and social text (topics, keywords, pronouns, and sentiments), we develop and evaluate a linear regression model that transforms iPhone tweets into a prediction of the quarterly iPhone sales with an average error close to the established prediction models from investment banks. This strong correlation between iPhone tweets and iPhone sales becomes marginally stronger after incorporating sentiments of tweets. We discuss the findings and conclude with implications for predictive analytics with big social data.

Social Data Analytics Tool (SODATO)

This paper presents the Social Data Analytics Tool (SODATO) that is designed, developed and evaluated to collect, store, analyze, and report big social data emanating from the social media engagement of and social media conversations about organizations.

Social Data Analytics Tool: A Demonstrative Case Study of Methodology and Software

This chapter presents a methodology and software tool for the analysis of Facebook data. In particular, it describes and demonstrates the analytical framework and computational aspects of the Social Data Analytics Tool (SODATO). SODATO fetches, stores, analyses and visualises data from Facebook walls. The method has been previously applied to the US elections of 2008 (Robertson 2011; Robertson et al. 2010a, 2010b). Here, we replicate and extend the analysis to Danish elections in 2011. Our substantive research question is to measure the extent to which Facebook walls function as online public spheres. To do so, we extract the Facebook walls of three prominent candidates in the 2011 Danish general election. Our findings show overlapping online public spheres and how different types of individuals inhabit these overlapping public spheres and how they provide structure and interpretive information for others.

Conceptual representations enhance knowledge construction in asynchronous collaboration

An experimental study of asynchronously communicating dyads tested the claim that conceptual representations could more effectively support collaborative knowledge construction in online learning than threaded discussions. Results showed that users of conceptual representations created more hypotheses earlier in the experimental sessions and elaborated on hypotheses more than users of threaded discussions. Participants using conceptual representations were more likely to converge on the same conclusion and scored higher on post-test questions that required integration of information distributed across dyads in a hidden profile design. However, the essay contents and post-test offered no evidence for differences in information sharing in itself. These results were most consistent when a knowledge map with embedded notes was the primary means of interaction rather than when it augmented a threaded discussion.

Fuzzy-Set Based Sentiment Analysis of Big Social Data

Computational approaches to social media analytics are largely limited to graph theoretical approaches such as social network analysis (SNA) informed by the social philosophical approach of relational sociology. There are no other unified modelling approaches to social data that integrate the conceptual, formal, software, analytical and empirical realms. In this paper, we first present and discuss a theory and conceptual model of social data. Second, we outline a formal model based on fuzzy set theory and describe the operational semantics of the formal model with a real-world social data example from Facebook. Third, we briefly present and discuss the Social Data Analytics Tool (SODATO) that realizes the conceptual model in software and provisions social data analysis based on the conceptual and formal models. Fourth, we use SODATO to fetch social data from the Facebook wall of a global brand, H&M and conduct a sentiment classification of the posts and comments. Fifth, we analyse the sentiment classifications by constructing crisp as well as the fuzzy sets of the artefacts (posts, comments, likes, and shares). We document and discuss the longitudinal sentiment profiles of artefacts and actors on the facebook page. Sixth and last, we discuss the analytical method and conclude with a discussion of the benefits of set theoretical approaches based on the social philosophical approach of associational sociology.

Public websites and human–computer interaction: an empirical study of measurement of website quality and user satisfaction

The focus of this paper is to investigate measurement of website quality and user satisfaction. More specifically, the paper reports on a study investigating whether users of high-quality public websites are more satisfied than those of low-quality websites. Adopting a human–computer interaction perspective, we have gathered data from the 2009 public website awards in Scandinavia. Our analysis of Norwegian and Danish websites reveals that the use of quality criteria is highly technical compared to the traditional usability testing focus on efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction of the actual system use by representatives. A Pearson correlation analysis of user evaluation from 296 websites that participated in the Danish web award Bedst på Nettet (‘Top of the Web’) showed no significant positive correlation between website quality and user satisfaction. We put forward recommendations for further investigation: (1) inclusion of real users (citizens and businesses) in real-use setting in the evaluation process could help move forward the understanding of the relationship between website quality and end-user satisfaction; (2) the lack of correlation between website quality and user satisfaction could be a point of departure for critical discussions of future implementation of public information and services and (3) additional and in-depth research of the measurement of website quality in the public sector, user expectations and the impacts of website quality improvements on user satisfaction.