Shawn Walker

Travel

• 24 Jun, 2019: AoIR Flashpoint Symposia - Below the Radar: Private Groups, Locked Platforms and Ephemeral Contents, Urbino, Italy
• 18-21 Jun, 2019: Partipatory Web Archiving: Opening the Black Box of Save Page now, RESAW19 - The way that was: archives, traces, reflections, Amsterdam, NL
• 27-28 Oct, 2018: Co-organizer - Locked out of Social Platforms: An iCS Symposium on Challenges to Studying Disinformation, Copenhagen, Denmark
• 10 - 13 Oct, 2018: AoIR 2018, Montreal, Canada
• 17 July, 2018: Monitoring Change in Web and Social Media Content: an Urban Big Data Centre Methods Seminar, University of Glasgow, Urban Big Data Centre/Digital Preservation Coalition
• 4 June - 13 July, 2018: Visiting Researcher, GESIS, Cologne, Germany
• 24-28 May, 2018: International Communications Association, Prague, Czech Republic

Informbot

In this project, we are developing an automated tool, “Inform Bot,” that researchers can use to create a public notice and trail of their data collection and research using Twitter data. The goal of this bot is twofold. First, to pilot a mechanism that provides systems of notice to users whose data is being collected in order to better understand the challenges of developing and implementing a transparency bot. Second, to better understand how users and researchers would interact with such a mechanism, when given the choice. For example, to what extent do users actually want to learn more about the research studies, or want to opt-out of such collection? Also, what is the experience of researchers who use this type of tool to be more transparent and what impact does this have on their research?

Collaborator: Dr. Nick Proferes, University of Kentucky

Fake News Shelf life: Content, Reach, and Ephemerality of Hyperpartisan News

This project aims to monitor the lifespan of hyperpartisan content that circulates on Twitter in the leading up to national elections and other democratic consultations. We plan to have the infrastructure of the project in place prior to national and regional elections to be held in 2018, including the United States gubernatorial, House of Representatives, and Senate elections, along with the Irish presidential elections, the Italian general election, the United Kingdom local election, the Brazilian general election, and the Russian presidential election. In our past research we have identified that user-generated, hyperpartisan news content has a remarkably short shelf life (Bastos & Mercea, 2017), a marker of the perishable nature of digital content at the center of political debates in liberal democracies (Walker, 2015; 2017).

We will use the public Twitter Streaming API to track the content tweeted by users in real time associated with the six electoral events listed above. After collection tweets will be parsed for real-time archiving of embedded content including images and URLs, hence identifying URLs tweeted in the context of electoral politics and archiving their content. URLs will be archived daily until they are no longer accessible (URL decay). At the end of each electoral period, we will analyze the type of content that disappeared using topic model (Grün & Hornik, 2011; Zhiqiang et al., 2013) and contrast that with the larger population of URL links tweeted in the period leading up to the vote. While analyzing content that has been deleted we also estimate the size of the retweet cascade that disappeared and whether there is a relationship between content (i.e., hyperpartisan and fake news) and content shelf life.

We seek to establish metrics for the lifespan of fake news and user-generated, hyperpartisan news articles. The project has the following objectives:

1. Estimate the lifespan of fake news and hyperpartisan news items
2. Establish reliable indicators for the type of content prone to URL change, decay, or deletion in the context of electoral politics
3. Identify platforms at the center of user-generated content which are likely to disappear shortly after the ballot
4. Develop tools for at-scale, real-time collection and monitoring of linked content embedded in social media datasets
5. Apply NLP techniques to detect content change and reuse

Collaborator: Dr. Marco Bastos, City, University of London

Archiving Social Media Data

What descriptive metadata, documentation, and statistics do archives need to provide researchers in order to preserve social media datasets for reuse? These questions are especially relevant as data archives such as the UK Data Archive and GESIS are already archiving and documenting social media datasets.

Bastos, M., Walker, S., & Simeone, M. (2021). The IMPED Model: Detecting Low-Quality Information in Social Media. American Behavioral Scientist, 65(6), 863–883. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764221989776

Walker, M. S., Gracie Valdez, Shawn. (2021, February 8). What covid-19 dashboards aren’t telling us. Slate Magazine. https://slate.com/technology/2021/02/covid-19-data-dashboards-states.html

Proferes, N. & Walker, S. (2020). Researcher Views and Practices around Informing, Getting Consent, and Sharing Research Outputs with Social Media Users When Using Their Public Data. In Bui, T.X. & Sprague, R.H. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 53rd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2020.290

Walker, S., Mercea, D., & Bastos, M. T. (2019). The Disinformation Landscape and the Lockdown of Social Platforms. Information, Communication and Society, 22(11), 1531-1543. https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2019.1648536

Bastos, M., & Walker, S. T. (2018). Facebook’s data lockdown is a disaster for academic researchers. The Conversation.

Driscoll, K., & Walker, S. (2014). Big Data, Big Questions| Working Within a Black Box: Transparency in the Collection and Production of Big Twitter Data. International Journal Of Communication, 8, 20.

Bennett, W. L., Segerberg, A., & Walker, S. (2014). Organization in the crowd: peer production in large-scale networked protests. Information, Communication   Society, 17(2), 232–260. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2013.870379.

Agarwal, S. D., Bennett, W. L., Johnson, C. N., & Walker, S. (2014). A Model of Crowd Enabled Organization: Theory and Methods for Understanding the Role of Twitter in the Occupy Protests. International Journal of Communication, 8(0), 27.

Nahon, K., Hemsley, J., Walker, S. & Hussain, M. (2011). Fifteen Minutes of Fame: The Power of Blogs in the Lifecycle of Viral Political Information. Policy   Internet, 3, 1–28. doi: 10.2202/1944-2866.1108.