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Using social and topical distance to analyze information sharing on social media
Author(s) -
Mongeon Philippe
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
proceedings of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.193
H-Index - 14
ISSN - 2373-9231
DOI - 10.1002/pra2.2018.14505501043
Subject(s) - social media , meaning (existential) , diversity (politics) , set (abstract data type) , content (measure theory) , computer science , user generated content , internet privacy , world wide web , sociology , psychology , mathematics , mathematical analysis , anthropology , psychotherapist , programming language
The diversity of social media platforms, users and uses has long been a challenge for social media research. The difficulty of inferring meaning from social media acts is also, and perhaps more importantly, due to the fact the even identical acts that are in appearance identical and that occur on the same platforms and contexts can have diverse meanings. This paper proposes a model based on the concepts of social and topical distance that can help shed light on the possible meanings of a social media act. The model considers the social relationship between the content creator and the user, as well as the topical relationship between the content the user's main topics of interest. It is demonstrated by analyzing a set of papers published in JASIST that were tweeted by researchers. The results show that the model can help differentiate between different types of heterogeneous social media acts and users or be used to characterize the attention that a specific content has received on social media.