Social Network and Topic Modeling Analysis of US Political Blogosphere Mark Burdick PhD Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Adalbert F.X. Wilhelm Dr. Jan Lorenz 1
Not the Research Question How do ideologies and social networks change together? 4
Locating the Project From Social Science ideology s role in textual content creation, in particular, political media. Social Science From Web Science - webcrawling, webscraping, and automated network mapping From Computational Analysis - semantic analysis techniques and visualization approaches Web Studies Computational Analysis 5
Ideology Rhetoric Teun van Dijk: Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach (1998), Politics, Ideology, and Discourse (2014), News As Discourse (2013) Connects ideology to discourse to rhetoric to news media Working definition based on van Dijk: Rhetoric is ideologically driven semantic avoidances or exaggerations achieved by deletion of words, substitutions of terms or names, and the repetition of certain topics. 6
- Webcrawling Webcrawling, Webscraping, Hyperlink Analysis - Webscraping - Hyperlink analysis - Influencer analysis (Bakshy, 2011) Influencers in a network (Seo, 2013) 7
- Comparative topic modeling (Alexander, 2016) Semantic Analysis and Visualization - Comparative word clouds (Diakopoulos, 2015) - Agent based modeling (Lorenz, 2011) An Example of a Comparative Word Cloud where pink represents mainstream media and blue represent blogs (Diakopoulos, 2015) 8
Why the US Political Blogosphere? - A social network consistently creating ideologically motived text - Fake News, Alternative Facts, Post-Truth - Blogs are increasing important for politics (Wallsten, 2007; Park, 2009) - Previous research on political blogs (Adamic & Glance, 2004; Diakopoulos et al, 2015) 10
Test Dataset Three blog posts from ten blogs every day for one month = approx. 850 documents Topic 1 Topic 2 Topic 3 Topic 4 Topic 5 Topic 6 Topic 7 Topic 8 Topic 9 Topic 10 tax trump obama clinton conservative political republican clinton trump clinton new clinton muslim email govern people elect american clinton problem govern media war fbi class left trump trump debate bias million women isi campaign reason online democrat country poll mrs money campaign islam depart people good president people voter big Blogs from Blue Group Topic 1 Topic 2 Topic 3 Topic 4 Topic 5 Topic 6 Topic 7 Topic 8 Topic 9 Topic 10 political clinton pence trump trump white trump work clinton immigration people trump right tax campaign president women american trump crime american elect court pay republican war sexual job debate people elect voter support new president iraq assault security president black america vote issue return comment veteran woman social question hate Blogs from Red Group 11
Visualizations 18
- Blogs selected based on Alexa rating - 40 Blogs in three two-month batches - Batch dates selected based on approaching political events: - G20: July 7, 2017 - Local Elections: November 7, 2017 - Russian Election: March 11 or 18, 2018 Building the Database Data Collection Post ID Blog ID Post Title Post URL Day Post Text 100001 1001 NRA strangely silenthttp://www.dailykos.com/ 1 Wait. What s that noise? It 100002 1001 Hillary Clinton's debhttp://www.dailykos.com/ 1 Hillary Clinton and Donald T 100003 1001 Donald Trump is sel http://www.dailykos.com/ 1 Donald Trump has made an 100004 1002 Hillary Clinton Scramhttp://www.breitbart.com/ 1 Democratic presidential no 100005 1002 Mike Pence: Donaldhttp://www.breitbart.com/ 1 Republican Vice Presidenti 100006 1002 The Country Can t Suhttp://www.breitbart.com/ 1 Supporting Donald Trump i 100007 1003 Taking A Stand On S http://www.huffingtonpos 1 AARP has asked all candida 100008 1003 One More Time: Whhttp://www.huffingtonpos 1 Let me make it clear, I am n 100009 1003 What To Read On Tr http://www.huffingtonpos 1 I recently criticized US polit 100010 1004 Trump: Blacks In Wohttp://talkingpointsmemo. 1 In an interview aired on Fri 100011 1004 Trump: Clinton Has Ghttp://talkingpointsmemo. 1 During a campaign rally in A 100012 1004 Clinton To Visit Charhttp://talkingpointsmemo. 1 Hillary Clinton's campaign c 100013 1005 Intelligence Official http://www.motherjones.c 1 US intelligence officials are 100014 1005 Trump Ohio Deputy http://www.motherjones.c 1 People across America reac 100015 1005 Ted Cruz Endorses Thttp://www.motherjones.c 1 For months, Ted Cruz has re 100016 1006 Trump advisor: Evehttp://hotair.com/archives 1 The advisor is Omarosa Man 100017 1006 Surprise! Team Trumhttp://hotair.com/archives 1 The spin: Sources from Don 100018 1006 Inevitable: Ted Cruzhttp://hotair.com/archives 1 I predicted in July that a Cru 100019 1007 Trump Earns Surprishttp://www.youngcons.com 1 One of the most interesting 100020 1007 Hillary Shouting Durhttp://www.youngcons.com 1 An anesthesiologist (and m 100021 1007 Woman Harasses Truhttp://www.youngcons.com 1 Donald Trump drives libera 100022 1008 Hillary's Pneumoniahttp://www.americanthink 1 Only four days after I wrote 100023 1008 Trump and the Anti-http://www.americanthink 1 If people call you an intell 100024 1008 The Anger Is Real http://www.americanthink 1 This weekend, I talked with 100025 1009 HILLARY: THE THIRD http://www.powerlineblog 1 On Monday, Donald Trump 100026 1009 THERE S SOMETHINGhttp://www.powerlineblog 1 Yesterday Tom Lifson took 100027 1009 BASKET OF DEPLORhttp://www.powerlineblog 1 David Brock, who runs neck 100028 1010 Trump s new SCOTUhttps://thinkprogress.org/m 1 Last May, Republican presid 100029 1010 Trump praises Egypthttps://thinkprogress.org/t 1 Just days after Republican p 100030 1010 Hillary Clinton gets ahttps://thinkprogress.org/c 1 Since her campaign began, 100031 1001 New York Times strohttp://www.dailykos.com/ 2 With just over six weeks to 100032 1002 Whoops! Hillary Clinhttp://www.breitbart.com/ 2 Democratic presidential can URL, Text Body, Hyperlinks 100033 1002 Politico: GOP Senatohttp://www.breitbart.com/ 2 Establishment Republican s 100034 1002 Jeff Sessions Pusheshttp://www.breitbart.com/ 2 Alabama Senator Jeff Sessi 100035 1003 Trump The Arsonist http://www.huffingtonpos 2 Michelle Obama said on Se Webcrawling front pages Webscraping articles Table: Blog, Date, Title, 14
Data Analysis Analysis Technique Unit of Analysis Purpose of Analysis Longitudinal Social Network Analysis Influencer Analysis Topic Modeling Weekly hyperlinks of blogs Weekly and total hyperlinks of blogs Weekly and total text bodies from individual blogs and social groups Determine structure and changes of the blogosphere Determine importance of individual blogs within a network Enable computational comparison of semantic differences across blogs Rhetoric Identification Topic Models Reduce topic models to instances of substitution, repetition, and deletion (rhetoric) Predictive Modeling Hyperlinks and Rhetoric Validate relationship between rhetoric content and influencer status 16
Questions? Feedback? Responses?
References Adamic, L. A. & Glance, N. (2005). The Political Blogosphere and The 2004 US Election: Divided They Blog. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Link Discovery (pp. 36-43). ACM. Alexander, E. & Gleicher, M. (2016). Task-driven Comparison of Topic Models. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. 22(1), pp. 320-329. IEEE. Bakshy, E., Hofman, J. M., Mason, W. A. & Watts, D. J. (2011). Everyone's An Influencer: Quantifying Influence on Twitter. In Proceedings of the Fourth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining (pp. 65-74). Van Dijk, T. A. (1997). What is Political Discourse Analysis. Belgian Journal of Linguistics. 11(1), pp. 11-52. Van Dijk, T. A. (1998). Ideology: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Sage. Newbury Park, CA. Van Dijk, T. A. (2013). News as Discourse. Routledge. New York. Seo, H., Kim, W., Lee, J., & Youn, B. (2013). Network-Based Approaches for Anticancer Therapy (Review). International journal of oncology. 43(6), pp. 1737-1744. Lorenz, J., Rauhut, H., Schweitzer, F. & Helbing, D. (2011). How Social Influence Can Undermine the Wisdom of Crowd Effect. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 108(22), pp. 9020-9025.
References Park, D. W. (2009). Blogging with Authority: Strategic Positioning in Political Blogs. International Journal of Communication. 3(24), 250-273. Wallsten, K. (2007). Agenda Setting and the Blogosphere: An Analysis of the Relationship Between Mainstream Media and Political Blogs. Review of Policy Research. 24(6), pp. 567-587. Diakopoulos, N., Elgesem, D., Salway, A., Zhang, A. & Hofland, K. (2015). Compare Clouds: Visualizing Text Corpora to Compare Media Frames. In Proceedings of IUI Workshop on Visual Text Analytics. 4th Workshop on Visual Text Analytics, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.