Robert Ackland

Online Collective Identity: The Case of the Environmental Movement

Abstract Social movements are making extensive communicative and organizational use of the Internet in order to identify social problems and bring about change. We present a model of an online social movement, where actors exchange practical and symbolic resources through hyperlink and online frame networks. Our positioning of these exchanges within a continuum of conscious and unconscious expressive behavior informs our framework for the empirical analysis of online collectives. An application using data collected from the websites of over 160 environmental activist organizations reveals significant fragmentation in this field of contentious activity, which we suggest reflects offline social divisions.

Social Network Services as Data Sources and Platforms for e-Researching Social Networks

Social network services such as Facebook provide new data for social science research into, for example, the role of individual characteristics in friendship formation and the diffusion of tastes in social networks. This article assesses the potential of social network services for social science research in two ways. First, it is argued that social scientists conduct hyperlink analysis differently to applied physicists and researchers from the library and information sciences, and face constraints (relating to theory, methods and availability of appropriate tools) that are not encountered in the other disciplinary approaches. However, the constraints regarding theory and methods are less likely to be faced by researchers of online social networks, and for this reason, the rise of Facebook and other similar services is a potential boon for empirical social scientists interested in networks. The second part of the article focuses specifically on the availability of research tools, and it is argued that social network services may eventually serve as e-Research platforms for delivering social network analysis tools.

Measuring Global Poverty: Why PPP Methods Matter

We present theory and evidence to suggest that, in the context of analyzing global poverty, the EKS approach to estimating purchasing power parities yields more appropriate international comparison of real incomes than the Geary-Khamis approach. Our analysis of the 1996 and 2005 International Comparison Project data confirms that the Geary-Khamis approach substantially overstates the relative incomes of the worlds poorest nations, and this leads to misleading comparisons of poverty across regions and over time. The EKS index of real income is much closer to being a true index of economic welfare and is therefore preferred for assessment of global poverty.

Engaging With the Public? Assessing the Online Presence and Communication Practices of the Nanotechnology Industry

This article examines whether the nanotechnology industry is engaging in the wider social debate surrounding it, through an analysis of its online communication practices. This is an important topic to study, given the nascent nature of the technology and the concerns among proponents to avoid the backlash biotech companies faced over genetically modified (GM) crops. Applying a new web crawling tool, the study captures and codes the hyperlinks of key nanotechnology companies according to their social and technical orientation, and status as producers, disseminators, and commercializers. The links are mapped and the prominence of social and technical issues is assessed. Finally, the home pages of sites are content analyzed to contextualize the presentation of the debate. The results show that although parts of the scientific community may have accepted the case for more engagement with the social aspects of nanotech, commercial developers are more reluctant to do so, at least based on their online presence.

How Web 1.0 fails: The mismatch between hyperlinks and clickstreams

The core of the Web is a hyperlink navigation system collaboratively set up by webmasters to help users find desired information. While it is well known that search engines are important for navigation, the extent to which search has led to a mismatch between hyperlinks and the pathways that users actually take has not been quantified. By applying network science to publicly available hyperlink and clickstream data for approximately 1,000 of the top Web sites, we show that the mismatch between hyperlinks and clickstreams is indeed substantial. We demonstrate that this mismatch has arisen because webmasters attempt to build a global virtual world without geographical or cultural boundaries, but users in fact prefer to navigate within more fragmented, language-based groups of Web sites. We call this type of behavior “preferential navigation” and find that it is driven by “local” search engines.

Hyperlinks and networked communication: a comparative study of political parties online

This study analyses hyperlink data from over 100 political parties in six countries to show how political actors are using links to engage in a new form of ‘networked communication’ to promote themselves to an online audience. We specify three types of networked communication – identity reinforcement, force multiplication and opponent dismissal – and hypothesize variance in their performance based on key party variables of size and ideological outlook. We test our hypotheses using an original comparative hyperlink dataset. The findings support expectations that hyperlinks are being used for networked communication by parties, with identity reinforcement and force multiplication being more common than opponent dismissal. The results are important in demonstrating the wider communicative significance of hyperlinks, in addition to their structural properties as linkage devices for websites.

WWW Hyperlink Networks

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on quantifying and understanding an organizations web presence as constructed via connections within and beyond the web sites, which is referred to as organizational/Web 1.0/static web presence. It provides a step-by-step guide to analyzing an organizations web site network and neighborhood using NodeXL. In the context of hyperlink networks, a few methodological questions need to be asked and answered for network analysis. With regard to the nodes in a hyperlink network, network analysis is more complicated than with offline social networks and even other types of online social networks. Web 1.0 hyperlink networks may be populated by nodes that are not homogenous in type, for example, organizations that have offline presence, while others like portals that do not have offline presence. Other methodological questions to answer before conducting hyperlink network analysis are: What are the network ties, and what are the boundaries to the hyperlink network? The VOSON Data Provider is a NodeXL data import plug-in for the collection and analysis of hyperlink network data. It provides a front-end to a data collection and processing service that is part of the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) System. It is a specialized hyperlink research service (VOSON) available as a plug-in service within a client-side network analysis and visualization software framework (NodeXL).

Political homophily on the Web

Homophily is a central concept within sociological research and describes the preference of actors in social networks to form ties on the basis of shared attributes, such as gender and race, as well as subjective characteristics such as political affiliations and desires for certain consumer goods. The study of homophily can provide important insights into the diffusion of information and behaviours within a society and has been particularly useful in understanding online community formation given the self-selected nature of the information consumed.

Incorporating Minimum Subsistence Consumption into International Comparisons of Real Income

Cross-country demand data are often consistent with the existence of a representative consumer with homothetic preferences. While homotheticity allows the construction of tight bounds to quantity indexes and their variance, it contradicts the biological reality that humans require minimum consumption of food, clothing, and shelter. This paper presents an approach for nonparametrically estimating bounds to utility from above-subsistence consumption. OECD data are used to show that homotheticity markedly compresses the real income distribution relative to what is found under the more general class of affine-homothetic preferences, and this has major consequences for estimates of convergence.

Engagement with news on Twitter: insights from Australia and Korea

ABSTRACT This study examines the patterns of news engagement among news consumers with different political affiliation and cultural background. We use computational methods and data from Twitter in a cross-country comparison of engagement with six online news sources in Australia and South Korea. For our analysis, we used a subset of Twitter users who retweeted at least one political story during the period of collection, and for whom we were able to predict political affiliation using correspondence analysis and data on Twitter follower ties to politicians. We find that right-wing Australian retweeters are more intense in their news engagement, compared with their left-wing counterparts, whereas in South Korea it was the opposite. Australian right-wing political retweeters have more diverse information sources, while there was no difference in information diversity between the right and left in South Korea. We discuss how the political situation in South Korea at the time of data collection may have affected our analysis. We emphasise the methodological contributions of our research and its connection to on-going research into the behavioural foundations of ‘filter bubbles’.