Browsing by Author "Li, Lin Tzy"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Between a Rock and a Cell Phone: Social Media Use during Mass Protests in Iran, Tunisia and Egypt
    Kavanaugh, Andrea L.; Yang, Seungwon; Sheetz, Steven D.; Li, Lin Tzy; Fox, Edward A. (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2011-05-01)
    In this paper we examine the use of social media, and especially Twitter, in Iran, Tunisia and Egypt during the mass political demonstrations and protests in June 2009, December 2010 - January 2011, and February 2011, respectively. We compare this usage with methods and findings from other studies on the use of Twitter in emergency situations, such as natural and man-made disasters. We draw on our own experiences and participant-observations as an eyewitness in Iran (first author), and on Twitter data from Iran, Tunisia and Egypt. In these three cases, Twitter filled a unique technology and communication gap at least partially. We summarize suggested directions for future research with a view of placing this work in the larger context of social media use in conditions of crisis and social convergence.
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    Microblogging in Crisis Situations: Mass Protests in Iran, Tunisia, Egypt
    Kavanaugh, Andrea L.; Yang, Seungwon; Li, Lin Tzy; Sheetz, Steven D.; Fox, Edward A. (2011-05-01)
    In this paper we briefly examine the use of Twitter in Iran, Tunisia and Egypt during the mass political demonstrations and protests in June 2009, December 2010 and January 2011 respectively. We compare this usage with methods and findings from other studies on the use of Twitter in emergency situations, such as natural and man-made disasters. We draw on my own experiences and participant-observations as an eyewitness in Iran, and on Twitter data from Tunisia and Egypt. In these three cases, Twitter filled a unique technology and communication gap at least partially. We summarize suggested directions for future research with a view of placing this work in the larger context of social media use in conditions of crisis or social convergence.
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    Social Media for Cities, Counties and Communities
    Kavanaugh, Andrea L.; Fox, Edward A.; Sheetz, Steven D.; Yang, Seungwon; Li, Lin Tzy; Whalen, Travis; Shoemaker, Donald J.; Natsev, Apostol; Xie, Lexing (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2011)
    Social media (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) and other tools and services with user- generated content have made a staggering amount of information (and misinformation) available. Some government officials seek to leverage these resources to improve services and communication with citizens, especially during crises and emergencies. Yet, the sheer volume of social data streams generates substantial noise that must be filtered. Potential exists to rapidly identify issues of concern for emergency management by detecting meaningful patterns or trends in the stream of messages and information flow. Similarly, monitoring these patterns and themes over time could provide officials with insights into the perceptions and mood of the community that cannot be collected through traditional methods (e.g., phone or mail surveys) due to their substantive costs, especially in light of reduced and shrinking budgets of governments at all levels. We conducted a pilot study in 2010 with government officials in Arlington, Virginia (and to a lesser extent representatives of groups from Alexandria and Fairfax, Virginia) with a view to contributing to a general understanding of the use of social media by government officials as well as community organizations, businesses and the public. We were especially interested in gaining greater insight into social media use in crisis situations (whether severe or fairly routine crises, such as traffic or weather disruptions).
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    Social Media Use by Government: From the Routine to the Critical
    Kavanaugh, Andrea L.; Fox, Edward A.; Sheetz, Steven D.; Yang, Seungwon; Li, Lin Tzy; Whalen, Travis; Shoemaker, Donald J.; Natsev, Paul; Xie, Lexing (2011-06-01)
    Social media (i.e., Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube) and other services with user-generated content have made a staggering amount of information (and misinformation) available. Government officials seek to leverage these resources to improve services and communication with citizens. Yet, the sheer volume of social data streams generates substantial noise that must be filtered. Nonetheless, potential exists to identify issues in real time, such that emergency management can monitor and respond to issues concerning public safety. By detecting meaningful patterns and trends in the stream of messages and information flow, events can be identified as spikes in activity, while meaning can be deciphered through changes in content. This paper presents findings from a pilot study we conducted between June and December 2010 with government officials in Arlington, Virginia (and the greater National Capitol Region around Washington, DC) with a view to understanding the use of social media by government officials as well as community organizations, businesses and the public. We are especially interested in understanding social media use in crisis situations (whether severe or fairly common, such as traffic or weather crises).
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    Twitter Use During an Emergency Event: The Case of UT Austin Shooting
    Li, Lin Tzy; Yang, Seungwon; Kavanaugh, Andrea L.; Fox, Edward A.; Sheetz, Steven D.; Shoemaker, Donald J. (2011-06-01)
    This poster presents one of our efforts developed in the context of Crisis, Tragedy, and Recovery Network (CTRnet) project. One of our derived works from this project is the use of social media by government to respond to emergency events in towns and counties. Monitoring social media information for unusual behavior can help identify these events once we can characterize their patterns. As an example, we analyzed the campus shooting occurred in the University of Texas, Austin, on September 28, 2010. In order to study the pattern of communication and the information communicated using social media on that day, we collected publicly available data from Twitter. Collected tweets were analyzed and visualized using Natural Language Toolkit, word clouds, and graphs. They showed how news and posts related to this event swamped the discussions of other issues.
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    Use of Subimages in Fish Species Identification: A Qualitative Study
    Murthy, Uma; Li, Lin Tzy; Hallerman, Eric M.; Fox, Edward A.; Pérez-Quiñones, Manuel A.; Delcambre, Lois M. L.; Torres, Ricardo da Silva (Department of Computer Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, 2011-03-01)
    Many scholarly tasks involve working with subdocuments, or contextualized fine-grain information, i.e., with information that is part of some larger unit. A digital library (DL) facil- itates management, access, retrieval, and use of collections of data and metadata through services. However, most DLs do not provide infrastructure or services to support working with subdocuments. Superimposed information (SI) refers to new information that is created to reference subdocu- ments in existing information resources. We combine this idea of SI with traditional DL services, to define and develop a DL with SI (SI-DL). We explored the use of subimages and evaluated the use of a prototype SI-DL (SuperIDR) in fish species identification, a scholarly task that involves work- ing with subimages. The contexts and strategies of working with subimages in SuperIDR suggest new and enhanced sup- port (SI-DL services) for scholarly tasks that involve working with subimages, including new ways of querying and search- ing for subimages and associated information. The main contribution of our work are the insights gained from these findings of use of subimages and of SuperIDR (a prototype SI-DL), which lead to recommendations for the design of digital libraries with superimposed information.