Twitter data: what do they represent?

Scholarly research into the uses of social media has become a major area of growth in recent years, as the adoption of social media for public communication itself has continued apace. While social media platforms provide ready avenues for data access through their Application Programming interfaces, it is increasingly important to think through exactly what these data represent, and what conclusions about the role of social media in society the research which is based on such data therefore enables. This article explores these issues especially for one of the currently leading social media platforms: Twitter.

Content creation and curation

Platforms for content created by web users have been associated with some of the most significant economic paradigm shifts in digital media. At the same time, user created content has often been at the center of heated scholarly debates around the democratization of media production, cultural participation, and public communication. In this entry, we provide an overview of such debates within media and communication research, particularly in relation to the evolution of mainstream platforms for content creation, curation, and sharing.

Digital storytelling at QUT

Digital Storytelling is a powerful means for enabling communication and social participation. Ordinary people work with expert creative practitioners to create first person narratives for a wide and growing range of purposes, including community building, cultural engagement, brand identification and public communication. A digital story usually combines 15-30 still images and a recorded script of 100-250 words to create an original personal digital story in the form of a 2-3 minute digital video. This form of co-creative media takes advantage of newly accessible technologies but is based in the ancient and universal tradition of storytelling. Digital storytelling is being adopted internationally in a variety of institutional contexts. It was introduced at QUT by Distinguished Professor John Hartley in 2004 when he brought well known UK based digital storytelling expert Daniel Meadows to the Creative Industries Faculty to trainer researchers and Faculty in the technique. Since 2005 Creative Industries Faculty researchers have adapted digital storytelling for use in a variety of research contexts including heritage, youth welfare, health, and international development, in collaboration with a range of external partner organisations. More than 300 digital stories have been produced by QUT researchers, staff and students. These have been presented on the World Wide Web, broadcast on community media, released on DVD and exhibited in various forms. In addition CIF researchers have produced numerous journal articles, conference papers and books reporting the outcomes of research projects utilising digital storytelling in research. As a result of research activity the Creative Industries Faculty is now well positioned as a leading site for teaching and learning in digital storytelling. Faculty research activity in digital storytelling has generated interest in adapting the form for use in undergraduate and postgraduate Creative Industries curriculum and in service teaching, including short courses for external clients.

A ‘Big Data’ Approach to Mapping the Australian Twittersphere

This chapter discusses the methodological aspects and empirical findings of a large-scale, funded project investigating public communication through social media in Australia. The project concentrates on Twitter, but we approach it as representative of broader current trends toward the integration of large datasets and computational methods into media and communication studies in general, and social media scholarship in particular. The research discussed in this chapter aims to empirically describe networks of affiliation and interest in the Australian Twittersphere, while reflecting on the methodological implications and imperatives of ‘big data’ in the humanities. Using custom network crawling technology, we have conducted a snowball crawl of Twitter accounts operated by Australian users to identify more than one million users and their follower/followee relationships, and have mapped their interconnections. In itself, the map provides an overview of the major clusters of densely interlinked users, largely centred on shared topics of interest (from politics through arts to sport) and/or sociodemographic factors (geographic origins, age groups). Our map of the Twittersphere is the first of its kind for the Australian part of the global Twitter network, and also provides a first independent and scholarly estimation of the size of the total Australian Twitter population. In combination with our investigation of participation patterns in specific thematic hashtags, the map also enables us to examine which areas of the underlying follower/followee network are activated in the discussion of specific current topics – allowing new insights into the extent to which particular topics and issues are of interest to specialised niches or to the Australian public more broadly. Specifically, we examine the Twittersphere footprint of dedicated political discussion, under the #auspol hashtag, and compare it with the heightened, broader interest in Australian politics during election campaigns, using #ausvotes; we explore the different patterns of Twitter activity across the map for major television events (the popular competitive cooking show #masterchef, the British #royalwedding, and the annual #stateoforigin Rugby League sporting contest); and we investigate the circulation of links to the articles published by a number of major Australian news organisations across the network. Such analysis, which combines the ‘big data’-informed map and a close reading of individual communicative phenomena, makes it possible to trace the dynamic formation and dissolution of issue publics against the backdrop of longer-term network connections, and the circulation of information across these follower/followee links. Such research sheds light on the communicative dynamics of Twitter as a space for mediated social interaction. Our work demonstrates the possibilities inherent in the current ‘computational turn’ (Berry, 2010) in the digital humanities, as well as adding to the development and critical examination of methodologies for dealing with ‘big data’ (boyd and Crawford, 2011). Out tools and methods for doing Twitter research, released under Creative Commons licences through our project Website, provide the basis for replicable and verifiable digital humanities research on the processes of public communication which take place through this important new social network.

On the secret key capacity of the harary graph PIN model

A pairwise independent network (PIN) model consists of pairwise secret keys (SKs) distributed among m terminals. The goal is to generate, through public communication among the terminals, a group SK that is information-theoretically secure from an eavesdropper. In this paper, we study the Harary graph PIN model, which has useful fault-tolerant properties. We derive the exact SK capacity for a regular Harary graph PIN model. Lower and upper bounds on the fault-tolerant SK capacity of the Harary graph PIN model are also derived.

Converses For Secret Key Agreement and Secure Computing

We consider information theoretic secret key (SK) agreement and secure function computation by multiple parties observing correlated data, with access to an interactive public communication channel. Our main result is an upper bound on the SK length, which is derived using a reduction of binary hypothesis testing to multiparty SK agreement. Building on this basic result, we derive new converses for multiparty SK agreement. Furthermore, we derive converse results for the oblivious transfer problem and the bit commitment problem by relating them to SK agreement. Finally, we derive a necessary condition for the feasibility of secure computation by trusted parties that seek to compute a function of their collective data, using an interactive public communication that by itself does not give away the value of the function. In many cases, we strengthen and improve upon previously known converse bounds. Our results are single-shot and use only the given joint distribution of the correlated observations. For the case when the correlated observations consist of independent and identically distributed (in time) sequences, we derive strong versions of previously known converses.

Essays on Correlated Equilibrium and Voter Turnout

This thesis consists of three essays in the areas of political economy and game theory, unified by their focus on the effects of pre-play communication on equilibrium outcomes.

Communication is fundamental to elections. Chapter 2 extends canonical voter turnout models, where citizens, divided into two competing parties, choose between costly voting and abstaining, to include any form of communication, and characterizes the resulting set of Aumann's correlated equilibria. In contrast to previous research, high-turnout equilibria exist in large electorates and uncertain environments. This difference arises because communication can coordinate behavior in such a way that citizens find it incentive compatible to follow their correlated signals to vote more. The equilibria have expected turnout of at least twice the size of the minority for a wide range of positive voting costs.

In Chapter 3 I introduce a new equilibrium concept, called subcorrelated equilibrium, which fills the gap between Nash and correlated equilibrium, extending the latter to multiple mediators. Subcommunication equilibrium similarly extends communication equilibrium for incomplete information games. I explore the properties of these solutions and establish an equivalence between a subset of subcommunication equilibria and Myerson's quasi-principals' equilibria. I characterize an upper bound on expected turnout supported by subcorrelated equilibrium in the turnout game.

Chapter 4, co-authored with Thomas Palfrey, reports a new study of the effect of communication on voter turnout using a laboratory experiment. Before voting occurs, subjects may engage in various kinds of pre-play communication through computers. We study three communication treatments: No Communication, a control; Public Communication, where voters exchange public messages with all other voters, and Party Communication, where messages are exchanged only within one's own party. Our results point to a strong interaction effect between the form of communication and the voting cost. With a low voting cost, party communication increases turnout, while public communication decreases turnout. The data are consistent with correlated equilibrium play. With a high voting cost, public communication increases turnout. With communication, we find essentially no support for the standard Nash equilibrium turnout predictions.

Política institucional ou pública?: uma reflexão sobre a mídia legislativa da Câmara dos Deputados

As condições de produção jornalística das mídias legislativas da Câmara dos Deputados são apresentadas neste trabalho a partir de três eixos de análise: cultura política, cultura jornalística e cultura institucional. Delineados para explicar as interferências e influências de diferentes campos sociais na atividade jornalística, esses conceitos são explicitados através dos dados empíricos coletados por meio de observação-participante e entrevistas em profundidade com os atores envolvidos no processo. As duas técnicas de caráter etnográfico foram utilizadas na construção de uma etnografia da produção das quatro mídias legislativas mantidas pela instituição: TV Câmara, Agência Câmara, Rádio Câmara e Jornal da Câmara. A conclusão do trabalho apresenta uma reflexão sobre os conceitos de comunicação política, comunicação institucional e comunicação pública, conforme eles aparecem nos veículos de comunicação do Parlamento.

Comunicação Pública e a Câmara Municipal: a comunicação e a democracia no legislativo da cidade do Rio de Janeiro

Esta dissertação tem por objetivo analisar a relação contemporânea entre política e comunicação, com a ênfase nos conceitos de democracia e de Comunicação Pública, de forma teórica e prática. A abordagem conceitual é realizada com a exposição e análise de fundamentos de autores relevantes à discussão sobre a importância da área comunicacional para o exercício político. O trabalho empírico, para verificar o cotidiano da comunicação em instituições políticas, é produzido por meio de um estudo de caso sobre os meios de comunicação elaborados na Câmara Municipal do Rio de Janeiro - o site, o diário oficial e o twitter que foram observados durante todo o ano de 2010, período no qual também foram realizadas entrevistas em profundidade com a principal responsável pela veiculação desses meios assessora Anette Silva - e breves visitas aos gabinetes de todos os vereadores em exercício. A avaliação das características desses meios é elaborada com base em uma proposta de classificação dos eixos e temas apropriados à Comunicação Pública com o intuito de colaborar para futuros estudos na área e de elucidar como os princípios dessa Comu nicação estão sendo negligenciados na prática governamental.

A pertinência da produção dos gêneros orais nas aulas do 6 ao 9 ano do ensino fundamental

Esta dissertação se propõe a analisar e a dimensionar a relevância que as propostas de produção de texto oral recebem nos livros didáticos do 6 ao 9 ano do Ensino Fundamental selecionados e indicados pelo Ministério da Educação, em seu Guia do Programa Nacional do Livro Didático (PNLD), em contraste com as de produção escrita. Também analisa a adequação dos gêneros textuais trabalhados em tais propostas, tendo em vista a preparação do aluno para o exercício da cidadania e a participação no mercado de trabalho por meio do domínio da linguagem oral, conforme orientação dos Parâmetros Curriculares Nacionais (PCN). Na impossibilidade de se analisarem todas as coleções indicadas no referido documento, optou-se por selecionar as duas mais frequentemente adotadas nas escolas públicas em todo o território nacional. Cumpre ressaltar que os PCN, documento oficial que apresenta um conjunto de orientações teóricas e metodológicas para o ensino de Língua Portuguesa, colocam em evidência o estudo dos gêneros textuais como um dos eixos do trabalho com a língua materna e têm abrangência nacional naquilo que recomendam. O PNLD, por seu turno, garante a quase trinta milhões de alunos brasileiros do 6 ao 9 anos do Ensino Fundamental o acesso a livros didáticos de seis componentes curriculares, incluindo a Língua Portuguesa, daí a relevância da pesquisa. Os resultados da investigação apontam para uma menor relevância atribuída à oralidade nas coleções analisadas, apesar da consonância das obras com as orientações dos PCN, as quais recomendam que sejam priorizados os gêneros textuais da comunicação pública. O presente trabalho ainda sugere linhas de ação no ensino da língua materna, de modo a reforçar, no aluno, o uso de variedades linguísticas orais publicamente adequadas, visando à participação social mais ampla e legítima, às exigências do mercado de trabalho e à realização plena do indivíduo que pensa e tem necessidade prática de exprimir seus anseios

TV Legislativa, publicidade e Comunicação Pública : estratégias de endereçamento do Jornal da Alerj

A presente dissertação investiga o jornalismo exercido pela TV Alerj (Assembleia Legislativa do Estado do Rio de Janeiro), estabelecendo como objeto específico a análise do Jornal da Alerj, principal telejornal da emissora. A partir do método do modo de endereçamento de telejornais exibidos 2013, seus resultados nos permitem afirmar que as edições recorrem a uma série de recursos e formatos de construção da imagem do Parlamento como instituição que presta contas ao cidadão, oferece transparência em seus atos e procura dar significatividade a assuntos que geralmente estão à margem do conhecimento público. Por outro lado, a mesma metodologia possibilitou identificar estratégias que contribuem para o silenciamento de discursos e gestos políticos e práticas que reforçam o centralismo de atores políticos, distanciando-se da missão de um veículo estatal com papel público de informar e com uma alta carga de institucionalidade. Para aferir os resultados, adotamos como percurso teórico o princípio da publicidade de Kant e dialogamos o conceito com a esfera pública habermasiana, sob a perspectiva de ser mais do que uma arena de debates, mas um referencial de visibilidade e discussão públicas. Desse modelo, resultam propostas em torno da Comunicação Pública em diferentes realidades (França, Itália, Reino Unido, Colômbia e Brasil) e a aplicação nas emissoras legislativas

Zintegrowane podejście dyskursywne do rozwijania sprawności mownych; przedstawienie celów i założeń projektu badawczego

Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie projektu o charakterze badawczo-wdrożeniowym dotyczącego doskonalenia obcojęzycznych kompetencji mownych (wypowiadanie się i rozumienie wypowiedzi ustnych) na poziomie zaawansowanym i przygotowywanym w Instytucie Filologii Romańskiej UAM. Niniejszy projekt zakłada, że istnieją spore możliwości podniesienia skuteczności i ekonomii kształcenia kompetencji mownych, poprzez zintegrowane podejście do celów kształcenia, a także poprzez wykorzystanie narzędzi internetowych. Podejście to zasadza się na integracji trzech zakresów kształcenia, a mianowicie: (1) doskonalenia umiejętności interakcyjnych w zakresie komunikacji półpublicznej, (2) rozwoju kompetencji medialnej oraz (3) rozwoju wiedzy dot. aktualnej, szeroko pojmowanej problematyki społeczno-kulturowej i krytycznego, zobiektywizowanego myślenia w stosunku do prezentowanych ujęć i naświetleń tej problematyki. W niniejszym omówieniu główny nacisk położony zostanie na uargumentowanie zasadności postulowanego zintegrowanego podejścia dyskursywnego, a także na wykazanie wartości dydaktycznej wybranych audycji medialnych. Zaprezentowane zostaną również główne kierunki pracy dydaktycznej oraz wyniki badania pilotażowego.

Phenotypical characterization in "Plasmopara halstedii" (sunflower downy mildew) isolates of several races

Phenotypic variation (morphological and pathogenic characters), and genetic variability were studied in 50 isolates of seven Plasmopara halstedii (sunflower downy mildew) races 100, 300, 304, 314, 710, 704 and 714. There were significant morphological, aggressiveness, and genetic differences for pathogen isolates. However, there was no relationship between morphology of zoosporangia and sporangiophores and pathogenic and genetic characteristics for the races used in our study. Also, our results provided evidence that no relation between pathogenic traits and multilocus haplotypes may be established in P. halstedii. The hypothesis explaining the absence of relationships among phenotypic and genetic characteristics is discussed.

Pl2 resistance gene differentiates the pathogenicity in four "Plasmopara halstedii" (sunflower downy mildew) races 304, 704, 314 and 714

In order to clarify the role of Pl2 resistance gene in differentiation the pathogenicity in Plasmopara halstedii (sunflower downy mildew), analyses were carried out in four pathotypes: isolates of races 304 and 314 that do not overcome Pl2 gene, and isolates of races 704 and 714 that can overcome Pl2 gene. Based on the reaction for the P. halstedii isolates to sunflower hybrids varying only in Pl resistance genes, isolates of races 704 and 714 were more virulent than isolates of races 304 and 314. Index of aggressiveness was calculated for pathogen isolates and revealed the presence of significant differences between isolates of races 304 and 314 (more aggressive) and isolates of races 704 and 714 (less aggressive). There were morphological and genetic variations for the four P. halstedii isolates without a correlation with pathogenic diversity. The importance of the Pl2 resistance gene to differentiate the pathogenicity in sunflower downy mildew was discussed.

Contribution to the knowledge of the genus "Cladonia" in Macaronesia

Sixteen species of the genus Cladonia are reported from Macaronesia from the Canary Islands. Three species are new to canarian flora and, two of them new to Macaronesia. The chemical variation of the taxa is reported. A phytogeographic distribution of the taxa with data on their habitat and ecology are presented.