Image credits: Swati Vats for the SMOL project. The Social Media, Online behavior and Language project focuses on online human behavior and computer mediated communication. SMOL is also internet lingo for something that's small and cute. Founding member and PI: Dr. Kokil Jaidka, Assistant Professor, NUS Research Areas: The role of affordances in computer-mediated communication:... Continue Reading →
The US Twitter landscape isn’t as political as it’s made out to be
Written by Subhayan Mukerjee, Kokil Jaidka, Yphtach Lelkes for Nicolas Berube, La Presse CanadaBased on the findings of our paper, recently accepted in Political Communication Image: LaPresse Canada Were you surprised when you realized that politics isn't the main driver of the US Twitterverse?It’s somewhat reassuring to see that people on Twitter aren’t that different... Continue Reading →
Thoughts on Vine vs TikTok
Compiled for Romano Santos, Vice. Image: CC Why do you think Vine was so popular, and why do you think it ultimately failed? Vine demonstrated the power of unedited raw video in a social media space saturated with text and touched-up selfies. It created a new genre of fast comedy content that is still nostalgically... Continue Reading →
Measuring political bias in text
Image source: http://snap.stanford.edu/quotus/#about In political science, scholars have reported on the reliability of news: Bhadani, S., Yamaya, S., Flammini, A., Menczer, F., Ciampaglia, G. L., & Nyhan, B. (2022). Political audience diversity and news reliability in algorithmic ranking. Nature Human Behaviour, 1-11. And the ideological leanings of the media firms: Martin, Gregory J and Ali Yurukoglu.... Continue Reading →
Conducting Research with Amazon Mechanical Turk
There's a lot to keep in mind when you're running HITs and experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk. The diagram you see up above describes how we did the recruitment for our study in which we had to screen and invite thousands of MTurkers into our experiment, just out in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. You... Continue Reading →
About Amazon Mechanical Turk and Fair Pay
If you're using Amazon Mechanical Turk for your research, welcome to the club! I love AMT and its diligent workers. I haven't hit their expectations in terms of fair pay..but I'm trying to get there. The source of this image and story is from Kate Crawford's book, The Atlas of AI. The story goes that... Continue Reading →
A new SMOL study is live!
This study is for Singaporean university students who regularly use Instagram, and have an Android phone. We would like to invite you to participate in an exciting research study about “Experiments with social media use.” If you stay committed to the research study over three weeks AND complete three short surveys, you will earn a... Continue Reading →
The role of affordances in computer-mediated communication
What is it about? Social media sites encourage certain kinds of behavior by design. Through the use of observational data and experiments, this project examines how affordances can introduce different social norms that improve the health of online discussions. Why is it important? Affordances, as features of technological design, play an important role in terms... Continue Reading →
Computational language models of human interactions
What is it about? To explore the relationship of language features with different phenomena related to human communication, interaction, and discussion. Why is it important? The digital traces left by internet users on websites such as social media platforms can yield important behavioral insights that can serve to test existing theories of social psychology, and... Continue Reading →
Tomorrow began yesterday
A study of the history of the universe tells us that if the universe's existence was shrunk into the size of an Earth-sized day, then humans are relatively only four seconds old. In the first zeptoseconds of these four seconds, one of our first inventions was a system to measure days, seasons, years, and our... Continue Reading →
The WikiTalkEdit dataset
This paper has had quite an adventure, and it finally has a home. The WikiTalkEdit dataset/paper tests whether the predictors of emotion change in a two-party conversation, are also predictors of behavioral change. The paper tests different language models and provide linguistic insights about the predictors of each kind of change. Inspired by a conversation... Continue Reading →