Measuring Information Exposure in Dynamic and Dependent Networks (ExpoNet)

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The advent of Web 2.0 - the second generation of the World Wide Web, that allows users to interact, collaborate, create and share information online, in virtual communities - has radically changed the media environment, the types of content the public is exposed to as well as the exposure process itself. Individuals are faced with a wider range of options (from social and traditional media), new patterns of exposure (socially mediated and selective), and alternate modes of content production (e.g. user-generated content). In order to understand change (and stability) in opinions and behaviour, it is necessary to measure to what information a person has been exposed. The measures social scientists have traditionally used to capture information exposure usually rely on self-reports of newspaper reading and television news broadcast viewing. These measures do not take into account that individuals browse and share diverse information from social and traditional media on a wide range of platforms. According to the OECD's Global Science Forum 2013 report, social scientists' inability to anticipate the Arab Spring was partly due to a failure to understand 'the new ways in which humans communicate' via social media and the ways they are exposed to information. And social media's mixed record for predicting the results of recent UK elections suggests better tools and a unified methodology are needed to analyze and extract political meaning from this new type of data.We argue that a new set of tools, which models exposure as a network and incorporates both social and traditional media sources, is needed in the social sciences to understand media exposure and its effects in the age of digital information. Whether one is consuming the news online or producing/consuming information on social media, the fundamental dynamic of consuming public affairs news involves formation of ties between users and media content by a variety of means (e.g. browsing, social sharing, search). Online media exposure is then a process of network formation that links sources and consumers of content via their interactions, requiring a network perspective for its proper understanding. We propose a set of scalable network-oriented tools to 1) extract, analyse, and measure media content in the age of "big media data", 2) model the linkages between consumers and producers of media content in complex information networks, and 3) understand co-development of network structures with consumer attitudes/behaviours.In order to develop and validate these tools, we bring together an interdisciplinary and international team of researchers at the interface of social science and computer science. Expertise in network analysis, text mining, statistical methods and media analysis will be combined to test innovative methodologies in three case studies including information dynamics in the 2015 British election and opinion formation on climate change. Developing a set of sophisticated network and text analysis tools is not enough, however. We also seek to build national capacity in computational methods for the analysis of online 'big' data.