Doctoral Dissertation Research in Political Science: Political Participation and the Blogosphere

政治学博士论文研究：政治参与和博客圈

• 批准号: 1065641
• 负责人: Nancy Burns
• 金额: $ 1.05万
• 依托单位: Regents of the University of Michigan - Ann Arbor
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-05-15 至 2013-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1065641&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Political; Science

This project taps an extremely rich source of political data, the political blogosphere, in order to understand timeless aspects of human interaction: attention, opinion, disagreement, persuasion, and participation. Few venues span the spectrum of political ideas better than the blogosphere, the sprawling online network of "web-logs" and their authors. Roughly 1.3 million Americans blog at least occasionally about politics, aggregate daily readership now exceeds that of major newspapers, and aggregate daily word counts reach the tens of millions. This diverse medium captures the thoughts of people from all walks of life, all lending their voices to a public forum that was almost unimaginable a generation ago.The intellectual merit of the project lies in its capacity to shed new light on long-standing questions about political participation. Previous research has focused primarily on how blogging is different, especially how blogging differs from traditional journalism. In contrast, this project shows how political blogging is strikingly similar--to political activism. The same social forces that lead people to vote, protest, or write letters to public officials can also lead them to blog about politics. Thus, classic theories of political participation can inform the study of blogging. The first part of this project explores these similarities. The investigator details the forces that drive participation in the political blogosphere, and shows where the blogosphere represents--and distorts--the voice of the electorate. Conversely, data from the blogosphere can open new avenues of research into political participation. Unlike most forms of communication, blogging leaves a permanent data trail. Archives of thousands of political blogs exist online, complete with text, dates, links, and comments. This project taps this wealth of social data using a combination of techniques from social and computer science: survey research, content analysis, web crawling, and automated text classification. Using this interdisciplinary mix of tools, the investigator surveys hundreds of bloggers and analyzes over a million blog posts. In the process, the researcher builds methodological bridges between social and computer science, making software and data available for future research. These data provide clues into behaviors that are hard to observe in other contexts, but matter deeply for society and for democracy. The second half of this project examines the timing, topics, and tone of political participation via blogging. Most past studies in this area have explained levels of participation, focusing on how much citizens are likely to get involved in politics. Rich data from the blogosphere enable the investigator to move beyond the study of levels of participation and examine the timing, topics, and tone of political blog posts. Bloggers' timing and choice of topics reveal patterns in information flow, public opinion, and social allocation of attention. The investigator also looks at tone of discourse as a key element in rational, civil discourse. By analyzing these aspects of participation together, in fine detail and at unprecedented scale, the researcher hopes to integrate strands of social science that have been separate in the past. This project makes three broad contributions to the study of three vital and rapidly changing aspects of US society: journalism, political participation, and civic discourse. The technology, economics, and culture of American journalism are in a state of rapid transition. By illuminating the ways bloggers are different from traditional journalists, this project will shed light on the directions new media and journalism are headed. In addition, since the classic studies of citizen activism in the 1990s, new modes of communication and participation have made a dramatic entrance into politics. By investigating blogging as an act of civic participation, this project will advance the study of how campaigns, agencies, interest groups, and individual citizens are using these new outlets to reshape participation and the outcomes of government. Moreover, many observers have commented that American civic discourse has made a sharp turn towards partisan polarization in the last two decades. The extent, causes, and consequences of this shift remain poorly understood. Studying discourse through the lens of blogging may offer insight into this recent trend.

这个项目利用了一个极其丰富的政治数据来源，政治博客圈，以了解人类互动的永恒方面：注意力，意见，分歧，说服和参与。 没有什么地方比博客圈更能跨越政治思想的光谱了，博客圈是一个由“网络日志”及其作者组成的庞大的在线网络。大约有130万美国人至少偶尔会写一些关于政治的博客，每天的读者总数现在超过了主要报纸，每天的总字数达到了数千万。这个多样化的媒体捕捉到了各行各业人们的想法，所有人都把自己的声音带到了一个在一代人之前几乎无法想象的公共论坛上。该项目的智力价值在于它能够为长期存在的政治参与问题提供新的见解。以前的研究主要集中在博客是如何不同的，特别是博客如何不同于传统的新闻。相比之下，这个项目展示了政治博客是如何惊人地相似-政治行动主义。同样的社会力量，导致人们投票，抗议，或写信给政府官员也可以导致他们对政治博客。因此，政治参与的经典理论可以为博客研究提供信息。本项目的第一部分探讨了这些相似之处。调查人员详细介绍了推动政治博客圈参与的力量，并展示了博客圈代表和扭曲选民声音的地方。相反，来自博客圈的数据可以为研究政治参与开辟新的途径。与大多数形式的交流不同，博客会留下永久的数据痕迹。数以千计的政治博客档案存在于网上，包括文本、日期、链接和评论。该项目利用社会科学和计算机科学的技术组合来挖掘这些丰富的社会数据：调查研究，内容分析，网络爬行和自动文本分类。使用这种跨学科的工具组合，调查员调查了数百名博客作者，并分析了超过一百万篇博客文章。在这个过程中，研究人员在社会科学和计算机科学之间建立了方法论的桥梁，为未来的研究提供软件和数据。这些数据提供了在其他环境中难以观察到的行为的线索，但对社会和民主有着深远的影响。这个项目的后半部分研究了通过博客参与政治的时间，主题和基调。过去在这一领域的大多数研究都解释了参与程度，重点是公民有多少可能参与政治。来自博客圈的丰富数据使研究者能够超越对参与程度的研究，并检查政治博客帖子的时间，主题和语气。博客作者的时机和主题选择揭示了信息流、公众舆论和社会关注分配的模式。研究者还将话语语气视为理性、文明话语中的一个关键因素。通过对参与的这些方面进行详细分析，并以前所未有的规模进行分析，研究人员希望将过去分离的社会科学链整合起来。该项目对美国社会三个重要且迅速变化的方面的研究做出了三大贡献：新闻，政治参与和公民话语。美国新闻业的技术、经济和文化正处于快速转型的状态。通过阐明博客与传统记者的不同之处，这个项目将阐明新媒体和新闻业的发展方向。此外，自20世纪90年代公民行动主义的经典研究以来，新的沟通和参与模式戏剧性地进入政治。通过调查博客作为一种公民参与的行为，该项目将推进运动，机构，利益集团和公民个人如何利用这些新的渠道重塑参与和政府的成果的研究。此外，许多观察家评论说，美国公民话语在过去20年里急剧转向党派两极分化。这种转变的程度、原因和后果仍然知之甚少。透过部落格的透镜来研究语篇，或许可以提供对这一新趋势的深入了解。