Announcements:
- 2012, June 4-7, Dublin, Ireland. Dr. Jean Marc Gawron. The 6th International AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM 2012). http://www.icwsm.org/2012/index.php
- 2012, May 29, 12:30-2:00 pm. Dr. Ming-Hsiang Tsou, at National Taiwan University (Room 202). "Cyber Geography: Visualizing and Analyzing Diffusion of Innovations inCyberspace and Social Networks." (link to PDF ).
- 2012, May 24-28, Phoenix, AZ. Dr. Brian Spitzberg. International Communication Association Conference "The map is not which territory?: Speculating on the geo-spatial diffusion of ideas in the Arab Spring of 2011" .http://www.icahdq.org/conf/index.asp (link to PDF).
- 2012, May 14-18, Taipei, Taiwan. The 8th Annual International Digital Earth Symposium (TIDES 2012). Dr. Ming-Hsiang Tsou, keynote speaker:
- "Mapping Social Media and Diffusion of Innovations on Digital Earth: Revealing the Invisible World". (link to PDF)
- "Research Challenges and Opportunities for Geospatial Cyberinfrastructure andMapping Cyberspace". (link to PDF).
- http://deconf.pccu.edu.tw/2012TIDES/en-speech-highlight-ks.html
Project Overview
The spread of ideas in the age of the Internet is a double-edged sword; it can enhance our collective welfare as well as produce forces that can destabilize the world. This project aims at understanding the process by which the impact of a single event or idea disperses throughout the world over time and space. Dramatic events, especially when reported through the new media of cyberspace, have the potential to transform ideas into realities, in ways that can either inform or inflame the public passions. This project seeks to map both the geography and the chronology of ideas over cyberspace, as the ripples of information usage radiate outward from a given event epicenter. By mapping and analyzing such ripples, new insights will be provided into the role of new media in biasing, accelerating, impeding, or otherwise influencing personal, social and political uses of such information.
This project will form a new multidisciplinary research framework in connecting social science and computer science for analyzing the dynamic information landscape on the Internet. The creation of a Spatial Web Automatic Reasoning and Mapping System (SWARMS) prototype will upgrade traditional "data mining" methods to advanced "information mining" approaches. This project will continue for four years collecting and analyzing data and thereby developing a theoretical structure on the spread of ideas.
Mapping ideas from Cyberspace to Realspace is funded by National Science Foundation, Division of Computer and Network Systems,
NSF Program CDI-Type II Award # 1028177. Opinions expressed are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the National Science Foundation. http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1028177