Project Proposal

My project proposal is to study information diffusion in online media (social media and news media) in order to understand how topics or statements traverse networks/communities over time via different types of actors. More specifically I am interested in how key statements e.g. statements that characterize different positions in a debate move within social media networks and connect to related online news outlets and vice versa. In this proposal I want to focus on environmental and energy issues and different levels of stakeholder engagement. As online discourses around issues like energy production and climate change are vast and highly complex, (social) media and network analysis has a crucial role to play in helping stakeholders to interpret and interact with them. Network analysis tools for navigating online media provide little help to users who want to assess diverse perspectives and potential communication opportunities in real-time. I am convinced that this project is an important building block for further applications and analysis projects to empower civil society and journalists to uncover hidden processes and further transparency in a more and more fragmented media landscape. By identifying stakeholder social media accounts and their interaction (e.g. retweets, hyperlinks) with different types of news websites I aim to identify whether emerging issues are contained in a specific network or if they spread to other networks and communities creating additional media exposure (therefore gaining influence). Visualizing how emerging topics are evolving and which stakeholders are actively spreading the message will make these complex processes more transparent for affected parties (e.g. journalists, public interest groups), helping them identify potential information gaps or communication opportunities. To exemplify this we can think of a new law on feed in tariffs for renewable energy being proposed by a state government. We can then analyze how actors from the political, industry and civil society spheres interact via social media channels and how they utilize coverage of online news media to spread statements in favour of their positions. On the other hand we can see how online news media are picking up statements from these stakeholders in reporting about the issue. By looking at this development over time we can asses if certain actors and media outlets are more effective in furthering their position than others. I plan to divide the project into three stages: Stakeholder (accounts) and news outlet research, Network/community analysis, and Application development.

I expect the stakeholder and media research to take up to two months of desk research, which will potentially be extended by empirical research through interviews in order to understand how stakeholders gather information and disseminate it. This will also help to provide insight into the question why messages are moving in networks as they do. For the second phase of the project I plan to aggregate data by monitoring the identified sources and then to pre-test results on a SNA application (e.g. Net Miner). I expect this phase to last around two months and also overlap with the third phase of developing an online application that visualizes the results, where users can intuitively explore issues and lines of communication. Online networks are focused on information sharing, and as such, have been studied extensively in the context of information diffusion i. Diffusion and influence have been modelled in various social media formats. One particular characteristic of diffusion behaviour is the correlation between the number of peers engaging in a behaviour and the probability of adopting the behaviour. ii I hope that with the resources and networks offered through the fellowship I will be able to develop a online application which can visualize how the topic (statements) move around media networks through time. The application should be publicly accessible in order to inform civil society groups, journalists and other potential stakeholders. The fellowship offers a unique opportunity to develop this type of application in an inspiring interdisciplinary environment.

E. Katz and P. F. Lazarsfeld. Personal influence; the part played by people in the flow of mass communications. Free Press, Glencoe, Ill.1955., H. D. Lasswell. The structure and function of communication in society. In L. Bryson, editor, The Communication of Ideas, pages 117130. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL, 1948. ii Z. Papacharissi, editor, A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, pages 1738. Routledge, 2010.