ANN presence at Sunbelt 2019

This year, ANN supported three graduate students to attend the XXXIX Sunbelt Social Networks Conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) in Montreal, Canada on June 21.

Yiqi Li (Fourth Year) presented a paper entitled “The Stitching Forces of Online Multi-Issue Social Movements.”

Ruqin Ren (ABD) presented a paper entitled “The Evolution of Knowledge Creation Online: Examining Wikipedia as a Dynamic System.”

Jingyi Sun (Fourth Year) presented a paper entitled “NGOs’ Agenda Building on Twitter in the Refugee Crisis: An Inter-organizational Network Approach.”

Best Published Article Award from Academy of Management 2019

Former ANN student Leila Bighash, Poong Oh and ANN faculty Prof. Monge and Prof. Julk won a Best Published Article award from the Organizational Communication and Information Systems Division of Academy of Management in August 2019. This paper is previously sponsored from the NSF grant activity.

This paper is: Bighash, L., Oh, P., Fulk, J. & Monge, P. (2018). The value of questions in organizing: Reconceptualizing contributions to online public information goods. Communication Theory, 28 (1), 1-21.

NSF Grant Research Report

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This network visualization is from a student research project sponsored by the NSF grant – Jingyi Sun & Yiqi Li,What Makes an Atypical Artist in Crowdsourcing? Network Brokerage and Information Diversity”


From 2015 - 2019, ANN members have conducted eight NSF-funded research projects to explore online creative crowdsourcing systems composed of distributed individuals with diverse roles, motivations, and other characteristics.

These research projects have been presented at conferences like the annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), annual conference of the National Communication Association (NCA), the International Communication Association (ICA) Annual Conference, the Organizational Communication Mini Conference, the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, and the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA) Conference.

Additionally, three subgroups have submitted papers that are under review at Communication Research, and Journal of Communication, and one project paper is under second review at Communication Research. Other subgroups are finishing final edits on papers that will be submitted to the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Human Communication Research, Information, Communication & Society, and Social Networks.

Click here to read our detailed NSF report.

ANN presence in NCA 2016

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Last week, multiple ANN members participated in National Communication Association 2016 Annual Convention in Philadelphia. Third-year doctoral student Yu Xu presented a paper titled “A Network Approach to Understanding Framing and Social Movements: The Case of the People’s Climate March”. Some other ANN members also presented works related to crowdsourcing, online communities, and content analysis.

XXXVI Sunbelt Conference of the International Network for Social Network Analysis

This year, the Sunbelt Conference will held in Newport Beach, CA from April 5th until 10th of 2016. Several ANN members will be presenting their research at the conference.

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Cruz, I.

Does Status Really Matter? Contextualizing Social Influence On Yelp

Hagen, C., & Clark, J.

Twitter Conversations about ISIS: Bridging Social Capital in the Networked Caliphate

Shin, J., Park, M., & Liu, W.

Diffusion of Social Media Among International Nonprofit Organizations

Sidnam, E.

Marketing Ecologies and Hashtag Structure in Commons Based Ecommerce Sites

Sun, Y.

“Who Communicates with Whom”: Social Capital, Designer Performance and Network Formation in the Online Brand Community

Wang, R., Li, L., & Fulk, J.

From Crowdfunding To Co-Production: Community Building Towards Collective Action On Kickstarte

Wang, Y.

Examining Yelp Business Network Using Homophily Theory

Xu, Y.

The Formation of Intention To Contribution in Teamwork: Examining The Roles of Peer Assessment, Extrinsic Motivation, and Average Tie Strength

Xu, Z.

A Two-mode Network Analysis of Top Crowdfunding Donors in Structural Equivalence

Annenberg Researchers Use NSF Grant to Study Online Creative Networks

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What do quirky t-shirt designs–avocados riding a bicycle built for two, a cat astronaut, pages and pages of movie, TV, and pop culture references–have to do with how humans create networks with one another?

A grant from the National Science Foundation is allowing USC Annenberg Communication Professors Janet Fulk, Peter Monge, and Lian Jian to work with colleagues at Northwestern University and Northeastern University to study the sprawling connections that power online creative crowdsourcing sites.

Lead investigator Fulk, along with her two co-investigators, Monge and Jian, as well as over a dozen Annenberg Communication doctoral students, are focusing on a popular design website called Design Maker. (Not its real name. Because of their data sharing agreement with the site, the researchers are not publicizing the name of the company.)

On Design Maker, artists submit designs they hope will eventually be printed on t-shirts, tote bags, iPhone cases, and throw pillows. Everything is user driven: the designs, the votes, the purchases.

Users score designs that are submitted by artists and that helps the Design Maker team choose which designs to print. There are many other websites that offer similar designs by independent artists but Design Maker is unique in that it allows users to vote before designs are produced.

This distinction, said Fulk, is why Design Maker is so valuable to their team.

“They provided us with sales data on the products, which most other design sites are not able to provide for research. This allows us to track not only how designs are rated within the community before production, but also how the design fared in the marketplace.”

Through data provided by Design Maker, they will be able to follow a design from submission to production to sales, asking how relationships and networks within the Design Maker community influence decisions at each step.

Fulk, Monge, and Jian are all members of the Annenberg Networks Network, or ANN, a research group that studies social networks. Their work asks important questions about why and how humans connect and make choices.

As they study the relationships between users on Design Maker, the voting system will also likely provide information about how influence spreads in a community.

"Social influence is much more prevalent when potential voters can see how other people have voted,” said Fulk, “compared to if they do not have information on how others have voted before making their own independent choice.”

The Design Maker website shows how many people have voted on an individual design. Users can also comment on the designs. If the commenter has submitted a design themselves, there will be a link, asking other users to score that design.

The social hierarchy of online communities can be useful both to researchers and to the site. Is a community member a “lead user” or an “occasional user”? If a lead user comments favorably on a design, will that influence other votes and comments? Will artists vote on each other’s designs reciprocally?

According to Fulk, “If site designers can learn the social influence processes of types of users who are most predictive of product success in the marketplace, they can make better decisions about which products to take to the market.”

The NSF project itself is a study in large group collaboration. Three teams of researchers, spread across the country in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston, are all working toward a common goal.

“Research has shown that although collaboration across institutions is more difficult, it produces research that generally is of very high quality,” said co-investigator Jian.

The USC researchers and their colleagues at Northwestern and Northeastern bridge the distance by meeting on a regular basis and coordinating their work over email, phone, and video.

Ultimately, the ANN team’s research with the NSF grant extends past Design Maker.

One artist uploading their design on Design Maker today could lead to changes in academia, the corporate world, and other creative projects as Fulk and her colleagues extrapolate their findings into a better understanding of how groups of people work together on larger projects.

Said Fulk, “By using multidimensional network analysis to identify relationships among people and products, we can better understand how to facilitate large-scale collaboration and learning.”



Originally posted by Sarah Holterman at http://annenberg.usc.edu/school-communication/doctorate-communication/discoveries/annenberg-researchers-use-nsf-grant-study-online-creative-networks

/r/SandersforPresident social network generated by ANN member Alex Leavitt.
Nodes (points) represent indivudal redditors, edges (lines) mean one redditor commented on another’s post. Each node is colored by its respective community within the network...

/r/SandersforPresident social network generated by ANN member Alex Leavitt.

Nodes (points) represent indivudal redditors, edges (lines) mean one redditor commented on another’s post. Each node is colored by its respective community within the network while the grey halo of nodes are people who only commented once, on Sen. Sanders Ask-Me-Anything thread.

NSF grant meeting kicks off the new semester

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On Sep. 10, we had an one-day meeting with Noshir Contractor from Northwestern University, Chris Riedl from Northeastern University, and our very own Janet Fulk, Peter Monge, and Lian Jian, discussing about the newly awarded National Science Foundation grant for researching crowdsourcing and collaboration on a crowdsourcing clothing design website.
We reviewed the research results that’s been generated from the current dataset so far, explored possible directions and potential new datasets. Many ANN faculty and students generated fabulous research ideas for the project.
(Above is a photo of our beloved Zombie-themed prints.)

ANN-SONIC-DELTA Get-Together

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Headed by Noshir Contractor of Northwestern’s SONIC lab, DELTA’s Leslie DeChurch from Georgia Tech and USC ANN’s Janet Fulk and Peter Monge, researchers and students studying networks and teams came together in a traditional English pub during this year’s Sunbelt Social Network Analysis conference in Brighton, UK.
It was such a great group of people that many stayed and forgot about the conference banquette over the vivid conversations. Thanks everyone for stopping by!

Janet Fulk to Receive Prestigious Fredric M. Jablin Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Organizational Communication!

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Janet was selected by members​ of​ ​the Organizational Communication Division​ ​(ICA) to receive the prestigious Fredric M. Jablin Award for Outstanding Contributions to the field. Each year, this esteemed award is​ ​presented to an organizational communication scholar who has spent his or her illustrious career moving the field forward as well as positively influencing colleagues and students.​ ​
Janet joins a select group of past recipients, including our very own Peter Monge and Patti Riley. Nosh Contractor, Linda Putnam, Stan Deetz, Cynthia Stohl, Scott Poole, and David Seibold are also examples of past recipients. I guess it’s fair to​ ​say that Janet​ ​and others dedicated to communication scholarship have played central roles in the development of our field’s robust and expanding​ network of​ ​connections, collaborations and research influence.

A research group studying social networks at the University of Southern California

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