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Texifter Social Data and Tools: August Prize Winners

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As a part of getting new users to test our Sifter beta, every month this summer we are awarding 12 #datagrants to academics. These prizes shave thousands of dollars of costs off of your research. The August social data and tools prize winners were: Kelli S. Burns, Ph.D. University of South Florida School of Mass Communications “I will look at the #icebucketchallenge during a particularly active time in the campaign (mid-August 2014) when several celebrities were creating a lot of attention for their videos. I plan to explore the celebrity impact on tweets as well as specific mentions of ALS in tweets about the campaign. I am also interested in conversation themes related to the campaign and how other organizations hijacked the hashtag for their own gain.”  @KelliSBurns Kathleen PJ Brennan PhD Candidate at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa Political Science “I hope to use my data and software prize to study the influence of internet memes on political interest and awareness.  This particular analysis will form part of a dissertation chapter on internet memes, which examines such memes as emergent agents in the overlaps of online and offline spaces.  This will be my first opportunity to incorporate such data into my dissertation, and I can’t wait to get started!”  @katiepbrennan  Aminu Bello Phd Research Student Marketing “To analyse data from social media   To find out the role of social media in  CRM  Data will be collected primarily from facebook and twitter pages”  Ann Pegoraro Laurentian University School of Sports Administration and I am the Director of the Institute for Sport Marketing, a research center at the university “I plan on using the Texifter Data and software to further my research work in social media use in sport. In particular, the historical data will be used by my colleagues and I to investigate how the use of Twitter by athletes, teams/organizations and fans has evolved over time.”  @SportMgmtProf Susan Currie Sivek Linfield College Mass Communication “I will use the prize to continue to study the relationship between journalism and social media. I am especially interested in how magazines use these media to connect to their audiences.”  @profsivek Dimitrinka Atanasova Research Associate (CascEff) and PhD student Media and Communication, University of Leicester “I plan to study information sharing about obesity, specifically I hope to identify the sources behind the web links that are shared most. For my recently submitted PhD I analysed obesity-related news articles from selected online newspapers, and while it can be expected that content from these should be among the most shared, I would like to see what other information sources are read/shared.”  @dbatanasova Hassan Zamir University of South Carolina School of Library and Information Science “The Texifter data prize will be primarily used as the data for writing my dissertation which focuses on how and what citizens and expatriates of Bangladesh reported about the Shahbag Movement during 2013 in Twitter. A content analysis of these tweets will be helpful to get an insight about the protest, it’s primary issues, protesters, and their concerns. The data will be useful for understanding how social media tools like Twitter increases democracy, civic engagement, and social empowerment. A potential outcome of this research will be designing a computer supported tool for better understanding worldwide social movements and mitigate the social crisis issues quickly.”  @hassan_zamir Jacob Groshek Boston university Emerging media “I plan to look at how people use social media in a smoking cessation program. Or follow other emergent social situations, like Ferguson or Gaza.”  @jgroshek Yunkang Yang University of Washington Department of Communication “I would use it to extract historical posts to study online discourse regarding a major public event in China in 2012, as well as the access to discover text to cleanse, code and visualize the data.   I hope to group those posts into categories to show the levels of contention in discourse and to reflect the role social media play in facilitating public debate.”  @yangyunkang Will Frankenstein Carnegie Mellon University Dept. Engineering & Public Policy / Center for Computational Analysis of Social and Organizational Systems “I will be using the data to explore how individuals communicate and discuss technological risk as expressed on social media. I will be focusing on discussions of nuclear proliferation. The prize is especially helpful for gauging and distinguishing the immediate social media response vs. the long-term response of major events related to nuclear materials, such as Fukushima and New START.”  Micah Altman MIT Libraries: Program on Information Science “We will experiment with PowerTrack to pilot to integrate dynamic corrections to official statistics. We will experiment with DiscoverText to perform collaborative evaluation of transparency in government data and websites.” @drmaltman  

Texifter Social Data and Tools: July Prize Winners

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As a part of getting new users to test our sifter beta, every month this summer we are awarding 12 #datagrants to academics. All you need to do to be included in the August drawing is submit a valid historical Twitter estimate request using sifter and then send us your CV. These prizes shave thousands of dollars of costs off of your research. The July social data and tools prize winners were: Enrique Castro Sanchez Centre for Infection Prevention and Management at Imperial College London

“I am interested in exploring how antibiotics and antibiotic resistance are discussed in Twitter, focusing on opinion leaders driving particular perceptions. The data will allow me to explore collective Twitter responses to news and events related to antibiotics, in an effort to understand how best mobilise public opinion.” @castrocloud

Stephen Barnard Department of Sociology at St. Lawrence University

“I plan to use the Texifter #datagrant and DiscoverText software package to extend my research on the significance of Twitter in American journalism. This may include collecting both real-time and historical tweets relating to major events in the journalistic field. Additionally, I am also hoping to use the Texifter/DiscoverText package as a grading tool, given that I often incorporate social media projects and Twitter discussion in my classes and have been searching for an efficient way to collect and grade them. This prize provides an ideal opportunity for me to experiment with new grading protocols.” @socsavvy

Gonzalo Bacigalupe Counseling Psychology at the University of Massachusetts Boston

“Do ehealth, innovation in healthcare and technology, mhealth, and other forms of ehealth ideas, emerge associated to the question of health equity, social determinants of health, and overall with concerns about social justice” @bacigalupe

James Reade Department of Economics at the University of Reading

“As an economist I am interested in how economic agents interact with each other; in particular how networks (formally or informally – hence Twitter and other social networks) influence decision-making. I hope to use this data award to learn more about the ways in which decisions are impacted by the position somebody has within a network.” @jjreade

Zachary Steinert-Threlkeld Political Science at the University of California – San Diego

“I am researching how individuals use Twitter to organize contentious action in authoritarian regimes. Because I have too many tweets to hand code, creating topic models is a core part of my research. Access to an Enterprise level DiscoverText account will prove invaluably productive.” @ZacharyST

Omar Jaafor Department of Computer Science at Université Jean Monnet in Saint-Etienne

“I will be using the data for community detection and anomaly detection. I am building algorithms that allow for community and anomaly detection in networks using both the attributes of nodes (country, age, messages…) and relationships between nodes.” @lmhasher

Libby Hemphill Communication and Information Studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology

“With Prof. Ed Lee in the IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, I’m studying how to evaluate online protests and their achievements. We use the case study method to examine tweets related to protests of NSA surveillance. Our goal is to develop a set of metrics by which we can better evaluate the success of online protests and what they may achieve, particularly in protests whose objectives do not involve revolution or overthrow of the government. The results of the project will be useful for Internet activists, businesses, media, policymakers, and software programmers in designing, evaluating, or utilizing social media for political purposes.” @libbyh

Bill Warters Department of Communication at Wayne State University

“I’m exploring social media commentary about the use of conflict resolution programming in schools, with a special focus on peer mediation. I’ve been gathering tweets related to peer mediation and find some interesting back-channel conversations going on that school staff probably are not aware of.” @bwarters

Nigel L. Williams FestIM Research Project, School of Tourism at Bournemouth University

“My research examines Digital Engagement by stakeholders with Projects and Events. I’m especially interested in applying Social Network Analysis and Text Analysis to understand conversations on Social Media about Projects and Events. In the Project Domain, I will look at online narratives discussing Crossrail, a London transport project. For Events, I will apply the data and software to examine the impact of online narratives on a costal destination” @Org_PM

Meredith Clark Journalism & Mass Communication at UNC-CH

“I will use the prize to extend my research into digital media use and connectivity among minorities.” @meredithclark

Stephen K Tagg Marketing at Strathclyde Business School 

“To produce academic articles on dynamic modelling of sentiments in the Scottish Independence Referendum debate. This is in cooperation with a colleague in the school of government (Dr Mark Shephard). Techniques for the analysis of unstructured data in the R software environment will be used: qdap, tm and Austin.” @stephenktagg

Bill Wilkerson Political Science at SUNY Oneonta 

“I am interested in learning about how the US Supreme Court is discussed on Twitter. What cases draw interest? What network patterns exist in this discussion? I hope that there is sufficient geo-location data to use this as part of the research as well.” @bill_wilkerson

Remember: All you need to do to be included in the July drawing is submit a valid historical Twitter estimate request using sifter and then send us your CV.

Texifter Social Data & Tools June Prize Winners

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As a part of getting new users to test our sifter beta, every month this summer we are awarding 12 #datagrants to academics. All you need to do to be included in the July drawing is submit a valid historical Twitter estimate request using sifter and then send us your CV. These prizes shave thousands of dollars of costs off of your research. The June social data and tools prize winners were: Kelly Fincham The Department of Journalism, Media Studies, and Public Relations at Hofstra University

“I will use the data and software prize to further my research and analysis of journalism practice on Twitter. My research agenda explores journalists’ evolving norms and practices on social media, specifically Twitter, in the U.S. and Ireland. This grant will help me to research and analyze this subject area  in more depth.” @kellyfincham

Martina Wengenmeir PhD candidate in the  Media and Communication Department at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand

“I am hoping to use the data and software prize for my PhD research on the recovery and rebuild after the Christchurch earthquake of 2011. I am particularly interested in framing and sentiment of tweets and am hoping to compare a historical data set during disaster response and recovery to the conversation about the rebuilt of the city which is still ongoing today. I am hoping to study the differences and similarities of conversations on Twitter now and then.” @tinserella

Carmina Godoy Postgraduate student in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid

“I will like to integrate the collected data (tweets) in my final essay in order to get my Masters degree. The subject of my essay is: racism online.” @CarminaGodoy

Warren Allen Assistant Professor at the iSchool at Florida State University

“This award will be used to collect and analyze select data from the early group stages of the 2014 World Cup. Social media – including but not limited to Twitter – are increasingly integrated into traditional (TV, radio, print) media campaigns. At the 2014 World Cup, the hashtags #becausefootball and #becausefutbol were promoted throughout the televising of the games. Exploratory thematic analysis of these Tweets – enabled by Sifter and Discovertext – will describe how the use of these commercially-oriented hashtags are used in comparison to what we know about live event Twitter usage in the current body of research.” @warrensallen

Bryce Newell PhD Student in the Information School at the University of Washington

“I plan to use the prize to capture and analyze online discussion and commentary about police use of automated license plate recognition (ALPR) systems and wearable cameras.  In particular, I hope to examine discussions related to the public disclosure of data generated by these systems under freedom of information laws.” @newmedialaw

Jae Eun Chung Assistant Professor in the School of Communications at Howard University 

“This project will survey the current use of online social media by health organization for health campaign and analyze the reach and diffusion of campaign messages. Despite the ever growing number of online social media-based health campaigns, little work has been done to understand how interactive natures of online social media are used for public health promotion. For this project, Twitter data will be analyzed to enhance our understanding of how health organizations use social media for public health promotion and how such uses of online media platforms are received by the public.”

Abhay Gupta Lecturer at Fairleigh Dickinson University

“I plan to use it to understand the dynamics of public opinion. In particular, I want to test various hypotheses on how major events (e.g. election wins, market crash, sports results) impact the sentiment and whether pre-event opinion analysis has any predictive power in explaining actual outcomes.” @EmpForesights

Victor Barger Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

“I am looking forward to using the Texifter data and software to investigate how consumers and brands communicate on social media. In particular, I’m interested in how language use affects consumer behavior in online contexts. Given the extent to which consumers have and are continuing to adopt social media, this research should have important implications for marketing practitioners.” @vabarger

Jamie Baxter Assistant Professor in the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University

“I am studying the influence of social movements on changes in the law — specifically land law. I hope to use the prize to access Twitter data that can tell me about the relationships between movement actors, how they form their interests, and how these change over time.” @jrgbaxter

Stephen Jeffares Professor in the School of Government and Society at the University of Birmingham

“I will use the software and data to continue my study of the lifecycle of policy initiatives. I used DiscoverText in my latest book Interpreting Hashtag Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Historic Twitter data reveals the first mention of policies that enjoy several months of widespread attention before disappearing without trace. To understand why and how this occurs, I will continue use DiscoverText to de-duplicate the dat
a and develop thematic code sets with a team of research assistants.” @SRJeffares

Cristian Vaccari Lecturer in Politics at the Royal Holloway University of London

“I am planning on using the data and software to analyze how politically motivated users of social media engage with mediated political events, such as televised leader debates and high-profile interviews, to better understand the interplay between television and social media in the flow of political messages.” 25lettori

Bill D. Herman Remember: All you need to do to be included in the July drawing is submit a valid historical Twitter estimate request using sifter and then send us your CV.

Gnip Power Track Expansion

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It’s official. Starting in January 2013, DiscoverText customers will be able to purchase monthly access to four vibrant Gnip-enabled Power Track data feeds. Building on current successes with Twitter, we are pleased to offer unprecedented federated Power Track access to WordPress, Disqus, and Tumblr as part of our social #bigdata offering. Keep an eye on the blog for the launch in early January. The DiscoverText Gnip Offering

Boolean defined search, n-grams, word clouds, and custom topic dictionaries

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Discover central topics and also elusive but valuable unexpected or rare concepts. Use this information to train machine-learning classifiers to recognize relevant text and social media data. Jump into data using an interactive word CloudExplorer or build a mini topic dictionary using “defined” search. Try our new CloudExplorer listview for seeing the top 300 bigrams or trigrams in your data. Merge or delete terms as part of building your custom text analytics model.

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