Posts tagged Social media

The Editorial Observations of a URL Shortener 

Gender Balance in News

Open Gender Tracking Project is a software program that collects digital content from news sources and analyzes gender balance within news organizations. The project was created by Irene Ros and Adam Hyland of Bocoup and Nathan Matias of the MIT Center for Civic Media. 

The program collects data on who is writing the articles and who the articles are written about. It also measures audience response data directly associated with specific articles (like how many times a post is shared in social media). The goal of the program is to make news sources aware of content diversity (or lack thereof) so organizations can work toward maintaining a balanced set of voices.

For the most part, women are currently being underrepresented in digital media. 

Via Guardian:

In the UK, newspaper front pages rarely include women, and women write a minority of articles. Women are prominent at the Daily Mail, where they write most of the celebrity news, fewer news articles, and almost no sport. Even when publications do include women, they’re often at the mercy of their audiences. 20% of Telegraph opinion articles are written by women, but women’s opinion articles attract only 14% of the Telegraph’s shares and likes on social media.

And according to studies done by the Women’s Media Center, in both legacy and newer news sites, women are too often relegated to writing about “pink topics” like fashion, relationships, and food, rather than urgent and/or international issues.

On a positive note, Global Voices, an international citizen media news site, is one of the only news organizations currently known to have equal gender participation. According to The Guardian, 764 women wrote 51% of all articles from 2005-2012. 

Related: Gender balance is the new rage. I just wish somebody had spread the word to the Wikiverse: Wikipedia Bumps Women From ‘American Novelists’ Category. — Krissy

Image: Screenshot of graph from Open Gender Tracker

The Geography of Hate Speech on Twitter

Dr. Monica Stephens, professor at Humboldt State University in California, worked with undergraduate researchers to create The Geography of Hate Map. The map geographically tags and plots homophobic and racist statements tweeted all over America from June 2012 - April 2013.

In Stephens’ introduction to the map, she explains that HSU collected the data with DOLLY (Data On Local Life and You), a University of Kentucky project that maps social media geography for research. 

The Geography of Hate Map suggests that out of 150,000 mapped tweets, most haters reign from the Midwest to the East Coast. Is this accurate? Sort of.

Via Time:

Stephens herself notes, “Even when normalized, many of the slurs included in our analysis display little meaningful spatial distribution,” and as she later tweeted, “in the east coast the counties are smaller so if a word is used in adjacent counties it appears as a hotspot,” which accounts for some of the East Coast / West Coast disparity.

What about hate words that are used in a joking way? As Chris Rock points out in his stand-up: ”It’s not always the word [that’s offensive], it’s the context in which the word is said.” To account for such varying intent, the researchers read each “hate-tweet” individually to determine a tweet’s sentiment as positive, negative, or neutral — and only negative tweets are shown on the map.

Though the study accurately depicts the hate of those Tweeters that managed to make it into the study, the map isn’t a perfect depiction of Twitter hate in the US. As Matt Peckham notes: people who haven’t enabled geotagging aren’t included in the study, meaning there could be more hateful tweets out there that haven’t been plotted. Also, more hate words exist than those Stephens chose to incorporate; when those other hate words aren’t counted, results are skewed. 

FJP: When social media becomes social meanie-a… - Krissy

 Image: Screenshot of The Geography of Hate Map

We Promise Not to Screw

Quick, someone teach the Yahoo social team how to use the Tumblr Twitter box. STAT.

Image: Automated tweet from Yahoo’s Tumblr to Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s Twitter account.

Rupert Murdoch, offering advice to Facebook, via Twitter.

Murdoch’s News Corp (in)famously bought Myspace in 2005 for $580 million and sold it in 2011 to Specific Media for $35 million. During a 2011 annual meeting, he admitted that News Corp managed to “mismanage it in every possible way.”

Is Yahoo Trying to Acquire Tumblr?

All Things D reports that Yahoo is trying to get its cool on with a potential Tumblr acquisition:

Earlier this week, Yahoo CFO Ken Goldman spoke at JP Morgan’s Global Technology conference and underscored the need for the aging Silicon Valley Internet giant to attract more users from the coveted 18-to-24-years-old age bracket. Along with more marketing, he explicitly said Yahoo needed to be “cool again.” …According to sources close to the situation, that could mean a strategic alliance and investment in or outright buy of perhaps the coolest Internet company of late: Tumblr.

Adweek follows up saying a deal could be done by this weekend, adding:

Such an acquisition could be just what CEO [Marissa] Mayer has been looking for to turn around Yahoo’s momentum; Tumblr has the potential to excite the engineering/Silicon Valley community (even though it’s based in New York) while recapturing the imagination of advertisers, who have grown to view Yahoo as big but stale.

While its revenue is modest, Tumblr has positioned itself as one of the few players in the digital ad world that is well suited for brand advertising. And Tumblr is also the domain of the young, cool and creative crowd—not currently a Yahoo sweet spot.

From Tumblr’s point of view, the deal also would seem to make a lot of sense. The company has been looking to make a big exit to justify its huge valuation.

Over at GigaOm, Om Malik suggests Facebook might try to swoop in on a deal.:

We have heard that Yahoo is worried that Facebook could swoop in at the last minute and beat it to the buzzer. If the Instagram acquisition was any indication, then we shouldn’t doubt [Mark] Zuckerberg’s salesmanship. [Tumblr’s David] Karp is said to have a close relationship with Facebook and was recently spotted at the Facebook Home launch. Facebook could use the much needed younger 18-to-24 year old demographic, something it (successfully) tried to acquire with Instagram. A Facebook spokesperson declined to comment.

Word of warning via 37signals: What happens after Yahoo acquires you:

Whether it’s Flickr, Delicious, MyBlogLog, or Upcoming, the post-purchase story is a similar one. Both sides talk about all the wonderful things they will do together. Then reality sets in. They get bogged down trying to overcome integration obstacles, endless meetings, and stifling bureaucracy. The products slow down or stop moving forward entirely. Once they hit the two-year mark and are free to leave, the founders take off. The sites are left to flounder or ride into the sunset. And customers are left holding the bag.

Sweet.

Now The Internet Will Write My Essay For Me

Via Reddit/quickmeme.

The Geography of a Tweet

A team of researchers lead by GDELT co-creator Kalev Leetaru gained access to the Twitter decahose last October and November and examined 1.5 billion tweets from 71 million users.

Among the many things they parsed from the two terabytes of data was the average physical distance between an original tweet its retweet: Some 749 miles (1205 km).

For @ mentions, the average distance between one user referencing another when exact geolocation is known is 744 miles (1197 km).

The paper, Mapping the Global Twitter Heartbeat: The Geography of Twitter, also includes the geographic difference between mainstream news media and news items from Twitter:

Mainstream media appears to have significantly less coverage of Latin America and vastly better greater of Africa. It also covers China and Iran much more strongly, given their bans on Twitter, as well as having enhanced coverage of India and the Western half of the United States. Overall, mainstream media appears to have more even coverage, with less clustering around major cities.

Image: Detail, Network map showing locations of users retweeting other users (geocoded Twitter Decahose tweets 23 October 2012 to 30 November 2012), via FirstMonday.org. Select to embiggen.

Have You Seen this Book?

Lexicographers, philologists and bibliophiles unite: there’s a book that needs to be found.

As the Oxford English Dictionary overhauls its dictionaries it’s reexamining the more than 300,000 entries in the OED. Sometimes though, the original sources are hard to find. Case in point, Meanderings of Memory by Nightlark, which is referenced 49 times from 1852. The OED can’t find the book in its catalog or databases. All it has to work with is the fragment seen above from a bookseller.

Via Sasha Weiss in the New Yorker:

I asked Katherine Connor Martin, head of U.S. dictionaries for Oxford University Press, about how the search had come about. Her answer amounted to a mini-history of the O.E.D.’s longtime practice of calling on the general public to aid its lexicographers. “We like to say the O.E.D. has been crowdsourcing since before there was a word for crowdsourcing,” she said.

In 1879, James Murray, a leading member of the British Philological Society who edited the first edition of the O.E.D., put out “An Appeal to English Speaking Readers,” asking for volunteers to comb through periodicals, pamphlets, works of literature, and scientific and philosophical treatises, and note down unusual words and to quote the sentences in which they appeared. “Anyone can help,” Murray wrote, “especially with modern books.” Readers took down their findings on six-by-four index cards—called “slips”—and submitted them to the dictionary’s editors. Over a million quotations were collected before the publication of the dictionary’s first installment. (The practice has continued, with a few lapses, since then—now it exists in digital form.) According to the O.E.D.’s Web site, “The quotations are one of the most important aspects of the entries contained in the OED. They document the history of a term from its earliest to its most recent recorded usage.”

So, word nerds, the hunt is on. A global search for a single book.

Image: Catalog entry for Meanderings of Memory, via the OED.