1,720,988 research outputs found
Truth-Seeking as Collaborative Work: Expert-Journalist Infrastructure in High-Stakes News Moments
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2025The modern, networked information environment enables public attention to converge and intensify quickly during high-stakes news moments. Sometimes, this attention is expected, as in elections; other times, it emerges suddenly, sparked by violence, leaks, protests, or when local developments escalate into national stories. In periods of heightened uncertainty, both directly affected individuals and ambient observers strive to make sense of unfolding developments while searching for plausible explanations. In this interpretive scramble, rumors and misleading frames can emerge and solidify within hours or days, sometimes in the absence of timely, credible information. Journalists have long assisted the public in interpreting complex, contested realities in their role as explainers and annotators—a role increasingly vital as people face an overwhelming volume and speed of information. To fulfill this role, journalists must "truth-seek", or make sense of events themselves. Yet, as this dissertation shows, access to experts—an efficient and valuable information source—and the systems supporting that access are patchwork, unevenly distributed, and break down with the demands of real-time reporting. These constraints widen the gap between public demand for information and journalists’ ability to provide timely interpretation to the public, especially for journalists with limited resources and amid industry strain. Drawing on qualitative methods—including ethnography, interviews, and participant observation—I present three studies that examine the sociotechnical and professional dynamics of journalist–expert collaboration during high-stakes news moments in the United States, including two contested presidential elections and other high-attention events such as public health crises, social justice protests, and moments of platform accountability and political violence. \begin{itemize} \item The first study investigates how journalists reporting on digital misinformation, often during or about these events, navigate knowledge gaps under deadline pressure, surfacing tensions around sourcing, tools, and ethics, and revealing a growing desire for more timely access to academic expertise. \item The second study analyzes thirty cases of journalist–researcher collaboration during high-tempo news events surrounding the 2020 U.S. election and certification period, identifying a typology of journalists’ needs and uncovering recurring ethical, logistical, and structural tensions. \item The third study examines a structured many-to-many online helpdesk deployed during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, demonstrating how intentional design of expert support spaces can mitigate previously identified challenges, while also requiring ongoing coordination and care. \end{itemize} Finally, I offer a conceptual contribution by articulating journalist–expert networks as part of the broader public sensemaking process and as a form of infrastructure: critical yet fragmented networks, tools, and routines that become visible in moments of strain—strain that emerges where high-stakes news events intersect with the demands of today’s networked information environment. This reframing offers both a conceptual shift and a normative claim: if journalists serve the the public by providing interpretation at speed, then improving access to expert knowledge during high-stakes news moment deserves attention, support, resourcing, and design—early provocations for which are offered as both a framework and a call to action in the final chapter of this dissertation
Understanding the Structure and Dynamics of Multi-platform Information Operations
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2021Information operations—efforts to distort the information ecosystem through methods such as the dissemination of disinformation in efforts to influence opinions or actions of individuals, governments or publics—are long-established methods of intelligence agencies and the military. However, the advent of social media has led to an era of renewed opportunity: the features and affordances of social media platforms, such as the interconnected social networks, abundance of user data, ability for any user to produce and disseminate content, and algorithm-driven feeds means that they are easier to deploy, and to deploy at scale. Disinformation (and information operations as the process of disinforming) disrupt decision-making, erode trust in institutions such as the media and government, and cumulatively undermine democratic processes. Recent conceptualizations of information operations as they occur on social media, such as the Russian Internet Research Agency’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 US Presidential Election, focus on the explicit coordination of inauthentic accounts. However, in this dissertation I will demonstrate that information operations are more complex—the distinction between the explicitly coordinated and organic aspects are blurred and the activities far more nuanced. Furthermore, despite increasing awareness and recent research there remain gaps in our understanding, including how strategic information operations and disinformation campaigns leverage the wider information ecosystem, taking shape on and across multiple websites and social media platforms. From a perspective of human-computer interaction (HCI), and in particular computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), this dissertation aims to contribute to this body of research by presenting four distinct but related studies that collectively build a comprehensive understanding of the structure and dynamics of multi-platform online information operations, including the integration of government-controlled and alternative media, the roles of different social media platforms (i.e. how they are used in complementary ways), and the online collaborative ‘work’ that brings these aspects together and sustains the information operation over time. Across the studies I adopt a mixed methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative research techniques to ask questions of digital trace data (evidence of online user activities and interactions) collected from Twitter. I systematically examine both the online conversation on Twitter plus the wider ecosystem of news-publishing websites and social media platforms linked-to in tweets. The broad contribution of this work is the revelation and exploration of online information operations, specifically how information operations take shape on and across multiple websites and social media platforms, and the collaborative ‘work’ required to sustain them. Theoretically, based upon the empirical findings presented, I reconceptualize information operations as not solely the product of inauthentic coordinated behavior (orchestrated bots and trolls) but as also involving authentic (as in real, sincerely participating) actors that loosely collaborate in the production, synthesis, and mobilization of contested narratives that serve the strategic goals of the information operation. Methodologically, I contribute to a growing body of work in the area of disinformation and online activism that utilizes a mixed-method approach to research. And, based on my examination of a multi-platform information operation, I end with implications for social media platform policy
Troubling Matters: Examining the Spread of Misinformation and Disinformation on Social Media During Mass Disruption Events
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2020Most users want Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, and other information streams to be free of misleading content. Whether this misleading content was spread unintentionally (misinformation) or on purpose (disinformation), understanding and responding to its flows has never been more important. This is especially true during periods of collective stress and uncertainty — like large-scale emergencies, disasters, and political protests — where misleading information can have potentially broad-reaching societal consequences. This dissertation aims to clarify some of the dynamics of online mis- and disinformation in such settings. It also seeks to provide insights to help researchers and designers formulate more human-centered responses to the challenges posed by misleading information — i.e. responses that can support human skill and ingenuity rather than rendering them passive. It does this by asking the following questions: Research Question 1: How do well-intentioned members of the online crowd, like journalists and ordinary people, understand their own actions when they unwittingly circulate misleading information on social media while using it for sensemaking? Research Question 2: How do state-affiliated actors opportunistically exploit these sensemaking efforts to spread disinformation? Research Question 3: How do disinformation campaigns invite their audiences to make sense of the information landscape through a lens of suspicion? To address the first two questions, I present three studies that give account of how different groups of social media users enacted the spread of misleading information as they participated in collective sensemaking, which is the process by which people build shared awareness around events that disrupt normal routines. Across the studies, I employ a combination of methods, including computational analyses of large Twitter datasets, interviews with social media users, and a qualitative analysis of alternative media websites. I address the third research question by integrating the findings from these separate studies and drawing on the literary theory of postcritique to unpack the interpretive gestures made by the disinformation campaigns examined in this research. The results of this inquiry yield contributions along several dimensions. Some of the main results illuminate how: i) social media users engage in correcting misinformation and reason about their choices; ii) disinformation campaigns blend their activities with online activism, making their efforts participatory and difficult to isolate; and iii) these campaigns manipulate critical perspectives to foster doubt and division. While making these dynamics more legible, I also draw forward some implications and articulate a design direction to broaden our repertoire of ideas for how we might address mis- and disinformation. In the larger picture, this inquiry makes empirical and theoretical contributions that can help us think about the appropriateness of how issues pertaining to misleading information are being framed, interventions are being shaped, and social and material possibilities are being constrained down the line
Social Media as Local Crisis Infrastructure: The Interconnected Work of Citizens, Responders, and Journalists in the Social Media Crowd
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2020This research considers the role of social media after the deadly 2014 Oso Landslide: how impacted community members, responders, volunteers, and journalists made use (and sometimes did not make use) of social media. Drawing on CSCW, HCI, and Crisis Informatics scholarship that treat social media systems as sites of information work, this study employs several methods to understand social media use after the Oso Landslide including extensive analysis of the public digital record, interviews, sites visits, and post hoc participant observation. Common sampling, computational, and quantitative techniques used by social media researchers are integrated into an interpretivist ethnographic approach thereby enabling an examination of social media use in the broader context of the affected community’s information work following the disaster. This study finds that social media were widely used by citizens, responders, and journalists working within the crisis-affected region. Though social media were not used by everyone in these groups, social media platforms played a substantive role in the information work for each of these groups. In some cases, social media were the primary means for doing certain kinds of information work pertaining to the crises and were integrated into many aspects of the response. The breadth of work and nature of the work taking place through these systems makes these systems candidates for consideration of social media as local crisis infrastructure. Yet, what is visible on social media is only a partial lens into community information work. Institutional arrangements, coordination practices, local cultural practices and sensibilities shape what is visible on social media. A desire for privacy and other practical considerations shape what community members, volunteers, and responders choose to share publicly. Many chose private or semi-private use of social media for community conversation, suggesting an ongoing need for trusted community information intermediaries. In this new kind of infrastructure, traditional regional media continued to play an important role, serving as common resources across responder and citizen interviewees who continued to reply upon news produced by regional journalists that circulated through social media and other mediums. Looking at several key instances of publicly visible online information work over different points of time, this work reveals that the social media work of citizens, responders, and journalists were often inter-dependent. From the earliest tweets raising public awareness of the landslide minutes after it occurred to post-emergency considerations of accountability, future preparedness and mitigation years afterwards, citizens, responders, and journalists played complementary and distinct roles in the production and dissemination of information. Aligned with pre-social media arrangements, journalists in regional news organizations with ties to print and broadcast followed by regional responding organizations were important as information sources. Different from pre-social media arrangements, citizens were active curators and disseminators of information from journalists and responders. This suggests that though social media have reshaped the contributions of citizens, responders, and journalists to public crisis information, their respective contributions remain tied to their social roles, their respective resources, practices, and their specific relationship to the impacted community. Together, these findings suggest that effective community information work is more likely to be the product of synergistic and complementary information work by citizens, responders, and journalists than it is to result from the work of one of these groups alone. Thus though social media has created new platforms for participation, enabling dynamic citizen and responder communication during emergencies, evidence here suggests journalists have not been replaced. Regional journalists were instrumental to civic sensemaking about the landslide from the earliest moments of the crisis through long term recovery. Considering the crisis-related information work of journalists, citizens, and responders as related and interdependent leads to a different way of conceptualizing local crisis infrastructure. Because local journalism is in decline, these findings have consequence for considering the crisis information infrastructures that can support communities in future emergencies
The Measurement and Representation of Influencer Communities in United States Political Discourse on Social Media
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2024The United States (U.S.) is in the midst of a paradigm shift in who creates news. It is widely known that the internet has in the past few decades displaced television and print newspapers as the primary medium where news is consumed. However, the past two decades have also seen a shift in who is communicating the news. People consuming digital news, and especially young people, are now less likely than they were to get their news from journalists or television broadcasters, and more likely to receive it from a nebulous figure commonly referred to as the influencer. People are not only paying more attention to influencers, but there has seemingly been a remarkable growth in the type of and number of influencers in the last decade. This growth has been enabled both by the maturation of new, massively-networked social media platforms and the industrialization of influencing as a profession and an economic infrastructure. In this dissertation, I use quantitative and qualitative methods to analyze case studies of U.S. political discourse networks to better understand the structure, tactics, and consequences of our new era of influencer media. After conducting a literature review of previous work on influencers in political communication and media studies, I propose flexible ways to represent both influencers and what I call influencer communities in social media networks. Influencer communities are assemblages of influencers working cooperatively and antagonistically to earn the attention of networked audiences on large social media platforms. Via four case studies of Twitter discourse in the U.S., each of which presents a new method for understanding influencers' behaviors and organization, I seek to understand how to represent and visualize influencer communities; how to analyze the strategies that influencers pursue within these communities; and how to understand the effects these influencer communities have on political discourse in the United States. I conclude this dissertation with a collection of reflections, most of which concern how characteristics of influencer communities, such as their embeddedness in power relations and their relationship to the "mainstream," structure which strategies influencers within them take
Personal Data and Team Dynamics: Tracking Technology in U.S. College Sports
No full textThesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2022My dissertation focuses on coordination around personal data and human-data interaction in a high-stakes, high-performance environment: college sports. In the last decade, wearable tracking technologies—e.g., FitBit, Garmin, Catapult, Whoop, Ōura Ring—have introduced new data streams, such as heart rate and sleep measurement, which college sports teams hope to harness to improve performance, prevent injury, and gain a competitive advantage. Sports teams, journalists, and entrepreneurs are all asking what can be done with tracking technologies? Their excitement about the potential of these technologies and the data they collect is shared by sports science and engineering researchers. However, when sports teams go to adopt these technologies, they face a myriad of options for tracking technologies and data management systems—all sold with the promise that tracking data could be used to keep athletes healthy by preventing injuries and overtraining and improve the team’s overall performance to win more competitions. It is possible that none of the options available are what teams need, but the promise of tracking technology has lured the sports community nonetheless. Drawing on socio-technical perspectives from Drawing on socio-technical perspectives from Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Information Science and Discursive Design, my dissertation takes a critical approach to the promise of tracking technologies. Instead of asking how tracking technology can be designed and used, I aim to shift the conversation to ask how tracking technologies should be designed and used? I examine how the adoption of tracking technologies may be disrupting current coordination between roles and explore how this disruption could make room for improved coordination and how the design and use of tracking data can support the needs of different roles at play in college athletics
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Full text link“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Full text linkWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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