Material
- Womens’ day tweets collection (available on-demand)
Description
The key focus of this project is the use of digital social research[1] focussing on “the application of a new generation of distributed, digital technologies to social science research problems »[2].
Gangs are defined as affiliated groups of individuals that claim control over physical territory in a community. They express similar behaviour through online social media as well. Gangs utilize social media as a way to maintain threatening virtual presences, to communicate about their activities, and to intimidate others.
Women accepted as part of the public space is still a rare event that creates embarrassment, anger, and violence from politicians, political parties, the press and voters. The discourse used to qualify the participation of women in politics, to criticize and evaluate them as politicians, as candidates in elections, is violent, sexist, biased and unfair. The violent reactions against women are visible in social networks and they see to function as gangs devoted to attack and threaten women. It is important to observe the degree of violence of these digital gangs:
- Monitor negative community effects of gang activities. This monitoring requires finding entities relevant to “gang” activities in posts as well as references to communities. Such information is essential to measure the impact of digital “gangs”.
- Discover opinion leaders who influence the thoughts and actions of other “gang” members. This includes discovering opinion leaders, their network and the reach of their influence can help to understand the social structure of gangs, which may be essential during designing crime prevention programs.
- Evaluate the sentiment of posts targeting communities, locations, and groups. Such sentiment analysis may be useful to identify rivalries, and may be used to anticipate crimes.
- Monitor community and gang responses to community sup- port programs. This monitoring may be useful in the evaluation of interventions and other programs executed by a town or city.
[1] Peter Halfpenny and Rob Procter, “The E-Social Science Research Agenda,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 368, no. 1925 (July 18, 2010): 3762
[2] Lisa Spiro, Rice University, Defining Digital Social Sciences, 9 April 2014, http://acrl.ala.org/dh/2014/04/09/defining-digital-social-sciences/#fn-15489-5, accessed 28.05.2016