Theses and Dissertations from UMD
Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2
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 give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.
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Item Emancipatory Hope: Reclaiming Black Social Movement Continuity(2019) Winstead, Kevin C; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)From the Freedom Songs to the Pullman Porters, African Americans have had to find ways to make collective use of the available means of communication for resistance, survival, and political organizing. The Movement for Black Lives carries on this tradition by using social media platforms, specifically Twitter. Accordingly, I asked: How do Black activists use Twitter to communicate ideas of hope and survival? Applying an adaption of Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis, I examined Black activists’ constructions and utilization of hope for political action through shared artifacts of engagement across Twitter. By engaging both the interface of Twitter, its uses, and significant cultural practices along with a content analysis of Black activists’ online discussion, I identified the technocultural political framing of the current movement for Black lives. I argued that hope becomes a vehicle by which African Americans pass along strategies and tactics for liberation through technocultural practice. I conceptualized these findings as emancipatory hope, a utopian expectation of the collective capacity for dismantling race, class, and gender dominance. This research has implications for how we understand social movement theorizing by including a technoculture lens to the abeyance formation of social movement continuity theory.Item HOW SCHOOL PRINCIPALS USE TWITTER TO SUPPORT LEADERSHIP PRACTICES: A MIXED METHODS DESIGN(2018) Lynch, Jennifer Mohler; Croninger, Robert G; Education Policy, and Leadership; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the past ten years, Internet-based communication mediums have eclipsed print and television media. Digital communications allow for information to be shared rapidly, in real-time, and with little mediation. The pervasive integration of digital platforms has changed the values, norms, and expectations of today’s society. This has profound implications for how school leaders interact with all stakeholders. School leaders are charged with executing three main roles: setting directions, developing organizations, and developing people (Leithwood & Riehl, 2003). Communication serves as a critical element that supports the effective execution of these roles. In a predominantly digital society, leaders may benefit from the integration of digital platforms to create a comprehensive communication profile. Despite a robust body of literature on leadership practices, there is little research on how K-12 school principals are using digital communication platforms to execute leadership roles and responsibilities. This study contributes to the literature by exploring how school leaders are using the popular digital platform Twitter. This research employed a sequential mixed methods design, utilizing both descriptive quantitative data and interview qualitative data to answer the question “who” is tweeting and explore the deeper questions of “why” and “how” school leaders use Twitter. This study moved through six phases with prior phases informing subsequent phases to construct a comprehensive profile of Twitter use and leadership practices. This research demonstrates that school principals primarily use Twitter as a promotional tool to excite and engage an expanded stakeholder base around a common vision. Both informational and promotional tweets served to build relationships, provide information, and satiate the intense informational needs of an expanded stakeholder base, now firmly situated in the digital generation. School leaders used Twitter to project information that serves to support their leadership roles of setting a vision and developing an organization. To a lesser extent, they used Twitter to consume and collect information that supports their leadership role of developing people.Item Relationships of social and physical environmental factors with cardiometabolic outcomes(2019) Huang, Dina; Puett, Robin; Nguyen, Quynh C; Epidemiology and Biostatistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The social and physical environmental factors impact health in general and have been linked with increased risks of cardiometabolic outcomes including obesity, diabetes, hypertension and cardiometabolic biomarkers. The dissertation added to important knowledge on this topic in two ways: 1) by leveraging innovative Twitter-derived characteristics to study the potential influence of social environment on cardiometabolic outcomes, 2) investigating the effects of air pollution exposures on cardiometabolic outcomes in youth living with type I diabetes. The first study investigated the associations between Twitter-derived area-level predictors (happiness, diet, physical activity) with cardiometabolic outcomes (obesity, diabetes, hypertension) using a nationally representative sample from National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). People living in neighborhoods with higher happiness, healthier diet and more physical activity had lower prevalence of obesity and hypertension but not diabetes. Twitter-derived social neighborhood characteristics can be used to identify communities with higher risk of cardiometabolic outcomes. We obtained data from SEARCH for Diabetes in Youth (SEARCH) study for the second and the third study. The second study examined the associations between chronic exposure to air pollution and glucose hemostasis (HbA1c) in youth living with type I diabetes. Particulate matter with aerodynamic diameter <2.5 (PM2.5), proximity to heavily trafficked roads and annual average daily traffic count were associated with higher HbA1c in study site South Carolina, Colorado and Washington, but not in study site Ohio and California. Differences in particulate matter compositions may explain the inconsistent results. The third study assessed the effect of acute exposure to air pollution on subclinical CVD markers including pulse wave velocity (PWV), augmentation index (AIx) and brachial distensibility (BrachD) using a repeated measures design. Reduction in PM2.5 on the day prior to assessment was associated with lower AIx, but not associated with either PWV or BrachD. In summary, exposure to air pollution may be associated with cardiometabolic outcomes and reducing air pollution may have implications in early prevention of cardiovascular complications for youth living with type I diabetes. Overall, reducing social stressors and reducing hazardous physical environmental factors may decrease the risk of cardiometabolic outcomes, providing possible directions for CVD prevention for public health practitioners.Item Early and often: Can real-time intervention by trusted authorities help stop a tsunami of disinformation?(2018) Zeitvogel, Karin; Nelson, Deborah; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)A tsunami of disinformation is washing over the world, with social media helping it to spread quickly and widely. The purveyors of disinformation use it to press their agenda by adding untruths where previously there were none, fabricating stories, reporting them out of context, or doctoring images to promote their message. In the past, disinformation has been a prelude to and run concurrently with other attacks, including cyber and conventional warfare, and when officials reacted to disinformation, they successfully slowed its flow but did not entirely stop it, and may not have “won” cyber or conventional battles. Researchers say even multiple corrections don’t fully stop disinformation, and sowing skepticism by forewarning of a probable disinformation campaign is the most successful way of staunching the flow. Tools have been developed to help detect disinformation rapidly but officials often don’t have a plan to track, correct or refute it.Item DESCRIBING URGENT EVENT DIFFUSION ON TWITTER USING NETWORK STATISTICS(2017) Sun, Hechao; Rand, William; Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I develop a novel framework to study the diffusion of urgent events through the popular social media platform—Twitter. Based on my literature review, this is the first comprehensive study on urgent event diffusion through Twitter. I observe similar diffusion patterns among different data sets and adopt the "cross prediction" mode to handle the early time prediction problem. I show that the statistics from the network of Twitter retweets can not only provide profound insights about event diffusion, but also can be used to effectively predict user influence and topic popularity. The above findings are consistent across various experiment settings. I also demonstrate that linear models consistently outperform state-of-art nonlinear ones in both user and hashtag prediction tasks, possibly implying the strong log-linear relationship between selected prediction features and the responses, which potentially could be a general phenomenon in the case of urgent event diffusion.Item The Marcellus Shale in Maryland and Twitter: A Mixed Methods Analysis of Tweets from November 2016(2017) Breitenother, Allison Gost; Puett, Robin; Environmental Science and Technology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Recent research shows about 75% of US adults are on social networking sites. Social media platforms like Twitter, provide potential new modes of networked public participation around contested technologies while affording communities a space for identity development and expression. During 2016, Maryland saw increasing interest in and debate around opening the State to hydraulic fracturing. To understand public perception of hydraulic fracturing, researchers collected tweets associated with relevant hashtags. Data collection occurred during the month of November 2016 which included the 2016 General Election and the release of proposed regulations in Maryland. The final sample of tweets for this period was n=638 stratified across thirteen hashtags. The timing, actors involved and central themes of the discussion around hydraulic fracturing in Maryland were analyzed using qualitative methods. The frequency of tweets by date showed three peaks – November 14, November 18 and November 22. November 14, 2016 was when the Maryland Department of the Environment released the proposed regulations, November 18 was a day of action referred to as #frackfreefriday and the content of tweets from November 22 focused on the regulations. Additional analysis showed individual actors and the hashtag #dontfrackmd contributed the most to the final. Additional stratification by hashtag, content and stance towards fracking further described the Twitter discourse around hydraulic fracturing in Maryland during the study period. Additional analysis is recommended to understand the public perception expressed on Twitter for the entire Marcellus Shale region as it pertains to hydraulic fracturing.Item Information Diffusion: A Study of Twitter During Large Scale Events(2014) Rogers, Christa Daniella; Herrmann, Jeffrey; Systems Engineering; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The diffusion of information through population affects how and when the public reacts in various situations. Thus, it is important to understand how and at what speed important information spreads. Social media platforms are important to track and understand such diffusion. Twitter provides a convenient and effective way to measure it. This study used data obtained from 15,000 Twitter users. Data was collected on the following events: Hurricane Irene, Hurricane Sandy, Osama Bin Laden's capture, and the United States' 2012 Presidential Election. Information such as the time of a tweet, the user name, content, and the ID was analyzed to measure the diffusion of information and track the trajectory of retweets. The spread of information was visualized and analyzed to determine how far and how fast the information spread. The results show how information spreads and the content analysis of data sets indicate the importance of different topics to users.Item Multilingual Use of Twitter: Language Choice and Language Bridges in a Social Network(2014) Eleta Mogollon, Irene; Golbeck, Jennifer; Geography/Library & Information Systems; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Social media is international: users from different cultures and language backgrounds are generating and sharing content. But language barriers emerge in the communication landscape online. In the quest for language diversity and universal access, the vision of a cosmopolitan Internet has stumbled over the language frontier. Expatriates, minorities, diasporic communities, and language learners play an important role in forming transnational networks, creating social ties across borders. Many users of social media are multicultural and multilingual; they are mediating between language communities. In the microblogging site Twitter, information spreads across languages and countries. How are multilingual users of Twitter connecting language groups? What are the factors influencing their language choices? This research advances a step towards understanding the network structures and communication strategies that enable intercultural dialog, cross-language sharing of information, and awareness of global problems. This dissertation research aims at: (1) exploring the ways in which multilingual users of Twitter are connecting different language groups in their social network; (2) modeling how the network influences their language choices; (3) and exploring what the textual features of their posts can elicit about language choices and mediation between groups. This dissertation goes beyond survey information about multilingualism and provides a deeper understanding about the structural relations between language communities in Twitter. This research work is one of the few that apply social network analysis to the study of sociolinguistic questions on the Internet. Focusing on the social networks of multilingual users, this dissertation contributes an original classification of network types based on the patterns of connections between language groups. Also, it applies the novel idea of modeling the influence of network factors in the language choices of the user. Finally, this dissertation tests the hypothesis that the type of exchange influences language choice, and explores with a theme analysis how other textual features might elicit cross-cultural awareness. These results can inform the design of social media platforms.