- Related item:
- Mapping the UK webspace: Fifteen years of British universities on the Web
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This paper maps the national UK web presence on the basis of an analysis of the .uk domain from 1996 to 2010. It reviews previous attempts to use web archives to understand national web domains and describes the dataset. Next, it presents an analysis of the .uk domain, including the overall number of links in the archive and changes in the link density of different second-level domains over time. We then explore changes over time within a particular second-level domain, the academic subdomain .ac.uk, and compare linking practices with variables, including institutional affiliation, league table ranking, and geographic location. We do not detect institutional affiliation affecting linking practices and find only partial evidence of league table ranking affecting network centrality, but find a clear inverse relationship between the density of links and the geographical distance between universities. This echoes prior findings regarding offline academic activity, which allows us to argue that real-world factors like geography continue to shape academic relationships even in the Internet age. We conclude with directions for future uses of web archive resources in this emerging area of research.
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- Multilinguals and Wikipedia editing
- Description:
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Multilinguals and Wikipedia editing
This article analyzes one month of edits to Wikipedia in order to examine the role of users editing multiple language editions (referred to as multilingual users). Such multilingual users may serve an important function in diffusing information across different language editions of the encyclopedia, and prior work has suggested this could reduce the level of self-focus bias in each edition. This study finds multilingual users are much more active than their single-edition (monolingual) counterparts. They are found in all language editions, but smaller-sized editions with fewer users have a higher percentage of multilingual users than larger-sized editions. About a quarter of multilingual users always edit the same articles in multiple languages, while just over 40% of multilingual users edit different articles in different languages. When non-English users do edit a second language edition, that edition is most frequently English. Nonetheless, several regional and linguistic cross-editing patterns are also present.
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- Global connectivity and multilinguals in the Twitter network
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Global connectivity and multilinguals in the Twitter network.
This article analyzes the global connectivity of the Twitter retweet and mentions network and the role of multilingual users engaging with content in multiple languages. The network is heavily structured by language with most mentions and retweets directed to users writing in the same language. Users writing in multiple languages are more active, authoring more tweets than monolingual users. These multilingual users play an important bridging role in the global connectivity of the network. The mean level of insularity from speakers in each language does not correlate straightforwardly with the size of the user base as predicted by previous research. Finally, the English language does play more of a bridging role than other languages, but the role played collectively by multilingual users across different languages is the largest bridging force in the network.
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- Cross-language Wikipedia Editing of Okinawa, Japan
- Description:
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Cross-language Wikipedia Editing of Okinawa, Japan. This article analyzes users who edit Wikipedia articles about Okinawa, Japan, in English and Japanese. It finds these users are among the most active and dedicated users in their primary languages, where they make many large, high-quality edits. However, when these users edit in their non-primary languages, they tend to make edits of a different type that are overall smaller in size and more often restricted to the narrow set of articles that exist in both languages. Design changes to motivate wider contributions from users in their non-primary languages and to encourage multilingual users to transfer more information across language divides are presented.
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- Where in the World Are You? Geolocation and Language Identification in Twitter
- Description:
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Where in the World Are You? Geolocation and Language Identification in Twitter.
The movements of ideas and content between locations and languages are unquestionably crucial concerns to researchers of the information age, and Twitter has emerged as a central, global platform on which hundreds of millions of people share knowledge and information. A variety of research has attempted to harvest locational and linguistic metadata from tweets to understand important questions related to the 300 million tweets that flow through the platform each day. Much of this work is carried out with only limited understandings of how best to work with the spatial and linguistic contexts in which the information was produced, however. Furthermore, standard, well-accepted practices have yet to emerge. As such, this article studies the reliability of key methods used to determine language and location of content in Twitter. It compares three automated language identification packages to Twitter's user interface language setting and to a human coding of languages to identify common sources of disagreement. The article also demonstrates that in many cases user-entered profile locations differ from the physical locations from which users are actually tweeting. As such, these open-ended, user-generated profile locations cannot be used as useful proxies for the physical locations from which information is published to Twitter.
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- Impact of platform design on cross-language information exchange
- Description:
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Impact of platform design on cross-language information exchange.
This paper describes two case studies examining the impact of platform design on cross-language communications. The sharing of off-site hyperlinks between language editions of Wikipedia and between users on Twitter with different languages in their user descriptions are analyzed and compared in the context of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. The paper finds that a greater number of links are shared across languages on Twitter, while a higher percentage of links are shared between Wikipedia articles. The higher percentage of links being shared on Wikipedia is attributed to the persistence of links and the ability for users to link articles on the same topic together across languages.
