In 2004, Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance published Divided They Blog, a paper in which they report a stark divide between left- and right-wing bloggers. They found relatively few links between liberal and conservative bloggers and more links among conservative bloggers than among their liberal counterparts. I asked whether Congress’s online conversations reveal a similar divide. Read more
Learning the Lingo goes to CSCW
Jahna Otterbacher and I will be headed to CSCW in February to present our paper - Learning the Lingo? Gender, Prestige and Linguistic Adaptation in Review Communities. Our findings suggest that women do participate in online communities but that their contributions get buried and stay mostly invisible. See the Room for Debate feature Where are the Women in Wikipedia? for a popular press take on the problem. Read the abstract after the jump. Read more
Public Officials on Social Media Project goes to Korea
Matt Shapiro is presenting our paper – Going “Bald on Record”: Relationships Among Public Officials’ Social Media Behavior and Language Use – at this week’s Korean Association for Public Administration and American Society for Public Administration Joint International Conference. Can’t make it to Korea for the talk? Read the abstract after the jump. Jahna Otterbacher also contributed to this paper. Read more
Lots of “debt” and very few “leaders”
Wonder what those politicians are spending all that time on Twitter talking about? Well, here’s what they were talking about over the summer:
Data for this Wordle came from tweets between June and August from the 389 members of Congress whose Twitter accounts I could verify.
Chicago Politicians on Twitter
Many of Chicago’s Aldermen, and certainly the Mayor, have adopted Twitter. Using all the tweets they posted, and all those posted by others who mentioned them, I was able to make the following graph of Chicago’s politicians on Twitter.
In this image, orange discs are Mayor Emanuel’s two Twitter accounts, blue discs are Aldermen’s accounts, and gray discs are neither (I want to say constituents, but I can’t assume all are). The opacity and weight of the lines connecting them depend on how often the two people talk about or to each other on Twitter. The size of the discs is determined by their in-degree, or how often someone talks about them. We see that two Aldermen figure prominently in the social media conversation, and both respond to people pretty frequently (outgoing arrows). What this means yet, I’m not sure, but it may indicate something about the responsiveness of politicians. The next step is to determine whether any of the properties we can identify in the network relate to things in the real world, e.g., voting behavior, responsiveness, public approval.
Jahna Otterbacher, Matt Shaprio, and I just received funding from IIT’s Social Network Workshop to continue our study of politicians and social media use, so stay tuned.