UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a given thesis/dissertation in DRUM.
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Item THE SOCIAL BASE OF MEMES: EXPRESSIONS OF IDENTITY, VALUES, AND AESTHETICS IN QUEER DIGITAL FOLKLORE(2023) Foster , Bobbie; Moeller, Susan; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Memes are a central part of digital communications and cultures. But memes are complex multifaceted expressions of identity and culture. Digital folklorists argue that memes, like traditional folklore, facilitate the creation of identity through socially constructed narratives that form unique groups online. Scholars across disciplines agree that memes rely on community participation, but the methods and theories vary widely. This dissertation advocates for the creation of Critical Meme Studies that centers critical inquiry to examine memes as a form of digital folklore that builds community identity, values, and aesthetics across social media platforms. The concept of boundary-marking memes is introduced to understand how memes build barriers of entry to conversations on public platforms. The methodology consisted of Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (Brock, 2018) and the pairing of Queer theories and methods related to the study of Camp as a form of detachment/attachment of political readings (Horn, 2018). As a result, the dissertation found LGBTQIA+ individuals use memes to construct answers to three core thematic questions, who is invited to Pride, what does Pride mean, and how should Pride look and feel. The answers used expressions of identity, values, and aesthetics to build responses that targeted in-group audiences.Item EXPLORING BLACK WOMEN’S HESA DOCTORAL EXPERIENCES AT HWIS: AN ANALYSIS OF SOCIAL MEDIA ENGAGEMENT USING CRITICAL NARRATIVE INQUIRY(2023) Clarke, Ashley Hixson; Kelly, Dr. Bridget T.; Counseling and Personnel Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The purpose of this study was to explore Black women’s experiences in higher education and student affairs (HESA) doctoral programs at historically white institutions (HWIs). More specifically, this study explored how Black women connected their HESA doctoral experiences with their social media engagement. Limited literature has captured Black women doctoral students’ experiences in the academy broadly, and there exists even less for Black doctoral students in HESA. Nascent research highlighted Black women’s colleges experiences, undergraduate and graduate students (master and doctoral), with strategies for navigating HWIs. One strategy for navigating HWIs is through community building with other Black women. Through digital technology, such as social media, community building has a wide reach to connect with other women, and other Black women college students. As such, social media was explored to understand how Black women college students connected their education to social media engagement. Employing digital Black feminism as the theoretical framework, this study contributed new knowledge for understanding how Black women connected their HESA doctoral experiences and social media engagement. This study complicated notions of agency and authenticity in Black women’s HESA doctoral programs and their social media engagement. Additionally, this study highlighted the complexities in how Black women doctoral students are socialized in the academy, specifically in HESA graduate programs at HWIs. Using critical narrative inquiry, eight Black women HESA doctoral students engaged alongside the primary researcher for an individual interview and a collective co-analysis. The interviews were guided by a co-constructive protocol where the co-researchers provided their input on topics to discuss individually. The co-researchers also met for a 1-hour co-analysis process as a collective group to share their insights on the findings. The findings revealed the following themes and subthemes: (a) Censorship at the HWI, followed by the subthemes of Researcher Socialization in the Academy and Reconciliation with HWIs; (b) Censorship on Social Media, followed by the subtheme of Scholar Tensions on Social Media; and (c) Presence of Doctoral Experiences when Engaging on Social Media. The findings illuminated how Black women doctoral students named their socialization process in their HESA doctoral program, how they navigated multiple spaces, and the advantageous ways they used social media as HESA doctoral students.Item #ISOLATEDNOTALONE DURING COVID-19: EXTENDING THE SITUATIONAL THEORY OF PROBLEM SOLVING TO ONLINE ABUSE INTERVENTION CAMPAIGNS(2023) Dias, Shawna; Aldoory, Linda; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Domestic abuse has long been regarded as a significant public health issue, but intimate partner violence cases increased dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic, leading some reporters to label it as “an opportunistic infection.” The United Nations attributed the increase in domestic abuse to COVID-19 quarantines and shelter-in-place orders, which forced victims to remain trapped in their homes with their abusers. Cosmetics brand, Avon, which has a history of responding to women’s health issues, launched the #IsolatedNotAlone abuse intervention campaign on its social media platforms. The campaign sought to educate the public about the ubiquitousness of domestic abuse and inform victims about available intervention resources. The #IsolatedNotAlone campaign was most active during the spring and summer months of 2020. During that time, the campaign reached an estimated 2.9 million social media users and provided supportive services to nearly 16,000 domestic abuse survivors. Although the campaign was a success, it didn’t reach near as many social media users as other abuse-related initiatives, like the #MeToo movement, which achieved 12 million reposts within its first 24 hours.This dissertation explores the usefulness of the Situational Theory of Problem Solving (STOPS) for understanding how publics organize and react to #IsolatedNotAlone and similar abuse intervention campaigns. STOPS is commonly used to examine public reactions to organizational crises, but this dissertation took an alternative approach and examined its applications for health communication. The research questions ask how situational antecedents, as outlined in STOPS, motivate social media users to learn more about domestic abuse, and how situational motivations and referent criteria influence the communicative actions of social media users. Additionally, the research questions ask how communicative behaviors influence online social support group formation and organization. The sample in this research included ethnically diverse men, women, and non-binary participants who identified as white, Black, Native American, Asian, and Hispanic. I chose to keep the sample demographics wide because I wanted to better understand how diverse groups experience and understand domestic abuse and domestic abuse intervention messages, and their motivations for communicating or not communicating about abuse. Twenty-eight social media users participated in semi-structured qualitative interviews via telephone or Zoom. The data suggests social media users with alike situational antecedents are similarly motivated to communicate about domestic abuse interventions unless they individually recognize significant constraints. Individuals with strong problem recognition and involvement recognition display a wider range of communicative actions than those with low problem recognition and involvement recognition. Based on the findings, this study produces practical implications for abuse intervention message design and distribution. The findings also demonstrate that STOPS has some utility for understanding public response to health intervention messages, though the framework may require adaptation for use in future health communication initiatives. The data suggest that referent criteria, time, and power have a larger role in health communication and influence audience members’ problem recognition, involvement recognition, and communicative actions.Item The People's Choice: PAIRing User-Centered Design With Crowdsourcing To Combat Misinformation on TikTok(2023) Grover, Saransh; Hassan, Naeemul; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social Networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok have created a rampant increase in user-generated content online. Moderation and validation of misinformation on these platforms are still significant challenges. One approach to address misinformation on social media has been to crowdsource the validity of content through the platform users. However, research conducted on crowdsourced fact-checking has focused largely on traditional and text-based sources. In addition, it has yet to focus on user-centered design to understand how users of platforms would create tools to mitigate misinformation. This thesis addresses these knowledge gaps by understanding approaches to using crowdsourcing to combat misinformation on TikTok, the fastest-growing social networking site with over one billion monthly active users. By using TikTok as a case study, I conduct a thematic analysis of content on the platform to understand how users currently counter claims and misinformation and then conduct participatory design sessions with TikTok users to identify limitations, improvements, and potential solutions. Based on these findings, I present a set of design guidelines referred to as the PAIR approach that outline key considerations for a crowdsourcing platform combatting misinformation on a social networking site such as TikTok.Item EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF USERS’ SUCCESSFUL STRATEGIES IN ONLINE PLATFORMS - EVIDENCE FROM CROWD-SOURCING AND SOCIAL MEDIA PLATFORMS(2021) Lysyakov, Mikhail; Viswanathan, Siva; Business and Management: Decision & Information Technologies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)With the proliferation and constant growth of online platforms, there has been an increasing interest among academicians and practitioners to understand various aspects of these platforms, including the effective design of platforms, their governance and user engagement. This dissertation seeks to add to this stream of research by leveraging large-scale unstructured data and corresponding data analytics and econometric techniques to examine users’ strategies in online social media and crowdsourcing platforms and gain insights into factors that lead to successful outcomes. The first essay examines the content strategies of closely competing firms on Twitter with a focus on how the similarity/dissimilarity of their content strategies impacts their online outcomes. I find that firms that are more adept at leveraging higher-level social media affordances, such as interactivity, collaboration, and online contests to differentiate their content strategies experience better outcomes as compared to their closest rivals that only leverage the basic technological affordances of social media. The second essay examines successful strategies of users (designers) in a crowdsourcing platform wherein clients post contests to solicit design solutions for a monetary reward. This study uses state-of-the-art deep learning and image analysis techniques to examine the strategies of experienced and less-experienced designers in open contests where later-entrants can potentially leverage information spillovers from earlier design submissions within a contest. I find that while later-entrants typically leverage information spillovers from earlier submissions in a contest, only experienced designers who are able to integrate information from multiple highly-rated early submissions are more likely to be successful. The third essay examines users’ strategies in response to the introduction of an Artificial Intelligence system for logo design in an online crowdsourcing design platform. In analyzing what differentiates successful contestants from the others, I find that the successful contestants significantly increase focus (i.e., the number of re-submissions per contest) and increase the emotional content as well as the complexity of their designs, in response to the introduction of the AI system. Collectively, the findings from these studies add to our understanding of successful strategies in online platforms and provide valuable insights to theory and practice.Item Cross-Platform Question Answering in Social Networking Services(2017) Bagdouri, Mossaab; Oard, Douglas W; Computer Science; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The last two decades have made the Internet a major source for knowledge seeking. Several platforms have been developed to find answers to one's questions such as search engines and online encyclopedias. The wide adoption of social networking services has pushed the possibilities even further by giving people the opportunity to stimulate the generation of answers that are not already present on the Internet. Some of these social media services are primarily community question answering (CQA) sites, while the others have a more general audience but can also be used to ask and answer questions. The choice of a particular platform (e.g., a CQA site, a microblogging service, or a search engine) by some user depends on several factors such as awareness of available resources and expectations from different platforms, and thus will sometimes be suboptimal. Hence, we introduce \emph{cross-platform question answering}, a framework that aims to improve our ability to satisfy complex information needs by returning answers from different platforms, including those where the question has not been originally asked. We propose to build this core capability by defining a general architecture for designing and implementing real-time services for answering naturally occurring questions. This architecture consists of four key components: (1) real-time detection of questions, (2) a set of platforms from which answers can be returned, (3) question processing by the selected answering systems, which optionally involves question transformation when questions are answered by services that enforce differing conventions from the original source, and (4) answer presentation, including ranking, merging, and deciding whether to return the answer. We demonstrate the feasibility of this general architecture by instantiating a restricted development version in which we collect the questions from one CQA website, one microblogging service or directly from the asker, and find answers from among some subset of those CQA and microblogging services. To enable the integration of new answering platforms in our architecture, we introduce a framework for automatic evaluation of their effectiveness.Item Microblogging Temporal Summarization: Filtering Important Twitter Updates for Breaking News(2015) Xu, Tan; Oard, Douglas W; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)While news stories are an important traditional medium to broadcast and consume news, microblogging has recently emerged as a place where people can dis- cuss, disseminate, collect or report information about news. However, the massive information in the microblogosphere makes it hard for readers to keep up with these real-time updates. This is especially a problem when it comes to breaking news, where people are more eager to know “what is happening”. Therefore, this dis- sertation is intended as an exploratory effort to investigate computational methods to augment human effort when monitoring the development of breaking news on a given topic from a microblog stream by extractively summarizing the updates in a timely manner. More specifically, given an interest in a topic, either entered as a query or presented as an initial news report, a microblog temporal summarization system is proposed to filter microblog posts from a stream with three primary concerns: topical relevance, novelty, and salience. Considering the relatively high arrival rate of microblog streams, a cascade framework consisting of three stages is proposed to progressively reduce quantity of posts. For each step in the cascade, this dissertation studies methods that improve over current baselines. In the relevance filtering stage, query and document expansion techniques are applied to mitigate sparsity and vocabulary mismatch issues. The use of word embedding as a basis for filtering is also explored, using unsupervised and supervised modeling to characterize lexical and semantic similarity. In the novelty filtering stage, several statistical ways of characterizing novelty are investigated and ensemble learning techniques are used to integrate results from these diverse techniques. These results are compared with a baseline clustering approach using both standard and delay-discounted measures. In the salience filtering stage, because of the real-time prediction requirement a method of learning verb phrase usage from past relevant news reports is used in conjunction with some standard measures for characterizing writing quality. Following a Cranfield-like evaluation paradigm, this dissertation includes a se- ries of experiments to evaluate the proposed methods for each step, and for the end- to-end system. New microblog novelty and salience judgments are created, building on existing relevance judgments from the TREC Microblog track. The results point to future research directions at the intersection of social media, computational jour- nalism, information retrieval, automatic summarization, and machine learning.Item EXAMINATION OF THE MANAGEMENT OF SOCIAL MEDIA RECORDS AT A FEDERAL EXECUTIVE AGENCY(2015) Doran, Chad; Bertot, John; Kurtz, Michael; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Maintaining and preserving records has long been regarded as essential to the functioning of federal government and to related open government initiatives in particular. However, the literature identifies specific technology and policy-related challenges of managing social media records. While there exists in the literature a limited examination regarding the management of social media content in the federal agencies, a close analysis is needed to identify how social media records are being managed in practice. As the nature of social media and electronic content are both rapidly evolving, it is important to ensure that current practice guidelines are applicable to new technology and continually re-aligned to policy as requirements and regulations change. In recent years, effective management of social media records has become relevant not only in terms of ongoing compliance but as an essential element of open government and transparency-related initiatives. Additionally, and perhaps even more important, all records management and archive practices, including social media preservation, serve a larger social function of maintaining and documenting our collective memory and experiences. This study provides an in-depth analysis of social media records management within a federal executive agency, utilizing a mixed-methods approach consisting of website review, document review, and follow-up interviews. This study presents theoretical as well as practical implications. On the theoretical level, the study contributes to records management theory, application of information models, and the definition of the record in the social media environment. On the practical level, this research provides recommendations to industry and federal agencies for the development of standards, guidance, and technologies for the management and preservation of social media records.Item Going Viral: Internet and Social Media Based Surveillance Systems for Detecting Influenza Activity in Maryland(2015) Bowen, Lisa; Gold, Robert S; Epidemiology and Biostatistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Influenza surveillance is essential for detecting and managing outbreaks. The Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DHMH) currently includes the number of emergency room and physician visits for influenza-like-illness (ILI) to track flu activity. Recently, internet and social media based surveillance methods have emerged as useful in detecting outbreaks. This study aims to determine if internet and social media based surveillance methods are useful in monitoring ILI in Maryland through assessing how Google Flu Trends (GFT) and tweets compare to portions of DHMH’s formal reporting system. Innovations of this study include using symptom based keywords and incorporating a variety of sources of surveillance data. Results show tweets had a strong positive correlation with all other surveillance sources, Pearson’s correlation coefficients ranged from 0.62-0.68. GFT were more highly correlated with DHMH data. Further research should investigate automating collection of tweets, application to other diseases, and standardized methods for location determination.Item Online Social Influence(2014) Zhang, Yuchi; Moe, Wendy W; Godes, David; Business and Management: Marketing; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation studies the behaviors of consumers in an online, social context. In the first essay, we jointly model the drivers of social media rebroadcasting behavior. Our goal in this research is to propose a framework and model of social media rebroadcasting behavior that integrates the various factors shown to influence rebroadcasting behavior. These include the role of message content and influence, factors that have been studied separately with very little integration. The results from our proposed model show that not only does rebroadcasting activity vary with the content of the original message but also that individuals are more likely to rebroadcast content that closely fits with their own interests. In the second essay, we ask whether online opinions impact consumers' decision quality and assess whether this impact occurs immediately or requires one to undergo learning first. We focus on a setting where consumers have multiple learning episodes based on their experiences with opinions from both uni- and bi-directional ties (i.e. weak and strong ties). We find that the dynamic effects are dependent on the strength of the tie. Additional strong ties (operationalized as bi-directional links) lead to immediate positive effects on decision quality. In contrast, additional weak ties (uni-directional, follower relationships) as a source of information lead initially to lower decision quality. However, highly-experienced consumers receive, ultimately, higher positive effects on decision quality from weak ties as compared with strong ties. Finally, in the third essay, we propose a new framework and model for identifying dimension specific influentials. We explicitly model individuals' preferences by estimating their locations on a market map to disentangle purchase behavior due to homophily from that due to influence. Our results show that it is important to estimate dimension specific influence, based on a comparison of model fit with a baseline model that measures influence along one dimension. We also show that individuals have varying levels of influence across dimensions, and an influencer for one dimension is not always influential on all dimensions.