INSPIRE: Tools, Models, and Innovation Platforms for Research on Social Media

INSPIRE奖的部分资金来自计算机和信息科学与工程局信息和智能系统司的以人为中心的计算计划，社会、行为和经济科学局的社会和经济科学司的政治学计划，以及多个董事会的社会计算系统计划。该项目寻求1)开发一个可负担得起的方法和途径的开源工具包，使信息和社会科学的研究人员能够描述、分析和可视化信息如何在社交媒体平台内、社交媒体平台之间和跨地理位置流动；以及2)应用这些方法和工具来创建和分析推文、帖子、相关消息和站点的数据集。最初的关注点是与这场社会运动相关的Twitter数据，这场运动最初名为“占领华尔街”，但后来扩大到包括其他场所，甚至其他话题。这项研究将开发社交媒体研究工具，并展示这些工具如何提高我们在社交媒体领域的研究能力。社交媒体平台正在改变我们的工作、共同生活和自我管理的方式。Twitter、YouTube和Facebook等社交媒体平台提供的多种模式创建了一个复杂的基础设施，从而在平台内部和跨平台以及在个人和群体之间形成了一个动态的信息流生态系统。由此产生的社会技术系统能够实现快速和紧急的组织和关系变革，但其范围和动态结构对研究变革机制的研究人员提出了概念上和实践上的挑战。消息流的数量、范围、复杂性和瞬息万变的性质相结合，需要一种跨学科的方法来开发研究方法和工具，用于管理、处理、存储和分析，而不是典型的关系数据库管理方法。研究的智力价值是双重的。首先，这项研究将结合社会科学、政治学、通信学、地理学、信息学和新兴计算技术的知识，创建一种可扩展且负担得起的方法，从与占领运动相关的大量推文、“赞”和链接中选择性地收集和分析数据。这种方法将被记录下来，并作为开放源码工具包提供给其他社交媒体研究人员，从而能够进行更广泛的调查。其次，这项研究将通过考察推文、地理位置以及可能与其他群体的联系，将占领运动作为一个当前活跃的例子，作为测试案例，有助于了解草根运动。社交媒体带来的新兴网络和联系信息生态系统补充了报纸和电视等传统媒体，信息可能会以前所未有的速度跨越社区和地理边界，迅速到达偏远和以前没有联系的受众手中。这项工作将为这些病毒式事件发生的机制提供新的见解，并将帮助我们理解病毒式事件对公众参与政治话语的影响。这项研究的更广泛影响既是直接的，也是累积的。用于数据管理、分析和可视化的工具包有可能转变社会和信息科学家可以使用社交媒体产生的大数据集进行调查的研究问题。这些工具使我们能够设想不同的框架，在这些框架内了解新的社交媒体社区如何形成并参与更广泛的公共话语。通过这种方式，这项研究可以改变我们思考和研究基层努力在社区形成和变化中的作用的方式。通过这项研究开发的技术将降低其他研究人员和观察员在此类数据集上进行自己研究时遇到的技术障碍和成本。这项研究聘请了新一代博士生和本科生研究人员。参与该项目的研究生将开发途径和方法，并将获得管理参与团队工作的本科生的经验。从事真正变革性工作的经历可以激励他们，给他们信心，让他们在未来尝试冒险和紧急的努力，他们可以在一个可能成为大型社交媒体数据集跨学科研究领域的领域成为领导者。

This INSPIRE award is partially funded by the Human-Centered Computing Program in the Division of Information and Intelligent Systems in the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering, the Political Science Program in the Division of Social and Economic Sciences in the Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, and the multi-directorate Social-Computational Systems Program.This project seeks 1) to develop an open-source toolkit of affordable methods and approaches that enables researchers in the information and social sciences to describe, analyze, and visualize how information flows within and between social media platforms and across geographic locations; and 2) to apply these methods and tools to create and analyze a dataset of tweets, posts, related messages and sites. The initial focus is on Twitter data associated with the social movement that began as "Occupy Wall Street" but broadens to include other venues and even other topics. This research will both develop tools for social media research and demonstrate how these tools improve our capabilities for research in this social media space. Social media platforms are transforming how we work, live together, and govern ourselves. The many modalities offered by social media platforms such as Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook create a complex infrastructure, resulting in a dynamic ecosystem of information flows within and across platforms and among individuals and groups. The resulting socio-technical system enables both rapid and emergent organizational and relational transformations, but its scope and dynamic structure present conceptual and practical challenges for researchers studying the mechanisms of the transformations. The combination of volume, scope, complexity, and ephemeral nature of message flows require an interdisciplinary approach to developing research methods and tools for curating, processing, storing, and analyzing that go beyond the typical relational database management approaches.The intellectual merit of the research is two-fold. First, the research will combine knowledge of social science, political science, communications, geography, information science, and emerging computing techniques to create a scalable and affordable approach to the selective collection and analysis of data from the huge flows of tweets, "likes," and links associated with the Occupy movement. The approach will be documented and made available as an open source toolkit for other social media researchers, thus enabling a wider scope of inquiry. Second, the research will contribute to knowledge about grass-roots movements, using the Occupy movement as a currently active example that can serve as a test case, by examining the relationships of tweets, geography, and the possible linkages to other groups. The emerging information ecosystem of networks and linkages enabled by social media supplement traditional media such as newspapers and television, and messages may "go viral," crossing community and geographic boundaries with unprecedented speed and quickly reaching remote and previously unconnected audiences. This work will provide new insights into the mechanisms by which these viral events occur and will help us understand the impact viral events can have on public participation in political discourse. The broader impact of the research is both immediate and cumulative. The toolkit for data curation, analysis, and visualization has the potential for transforming the research questions social and information scientists can investigate using large datasets resulting from social media. These tools can enable us to envision different frameworks within which to understand how new social media communities form and engage in the broader public discourse. In this way, the research can transform how we think about and study the role of grass roots endeavors in community formation and change. The techniques developed through this research will lower the technical barriers and costs encountered by other researchers and observers who conduct their own research on such datasets. The research engages a new generation of researchers at both the doctoral and undergraduate levels. Graduate students working on the project will be developing the approach and methods and will be gaining experience in managing undergraduate students who work on the team. The experience of working on a truly transformative effort can inspire them and give them confidence to try risky and emergent efforts in the future, and they can be leaders in what may become an interdisciplinary area of study of large social media datasets.