Please find below an overview of Computational Methods sessions for ICA 2019. Thanks to all submitters and reviewers for the fantastic lineup. We’re looking forward to meeting you all again in Washington! See the full ICA programme here.

Computational approaches to political communication

(25-May-2019 11:00 AM-12:15 PM, Morgan (Washington Hilton, Lobby Level))

• The Dynamic Relationship between News Frames and Real-World Events: A Hidden Markov Model Approach(F. R. Hopp; J. T. Fisher; R. Weber)
• Do People Create Filter Bubbles?: A Computational Examination of Political Network Curation on Twitter(J. Yang)
• Sticks in a Bundle are Unbreakable? The Effect of Polarization on Parties’ Compromise Rhetoric in 7 European Democracies, 1995 – 2013(M. van der Velden; A. Alberto)
• Does Partisan News Polarize America?:
  A Field Experiment on the Effects of Forced Partisan Media Exposure(P. Barberá; J. Yang; A. Guess; S. Munzert)
• Search Media and Elections: Investigating Partisanship in Political Search Results(D. Metaxa-Kakavouli; J. S. Park; J. A. Landay; J. Hancock)
• Normalizing Swearing Online: An Unintended Consequence of a Large-Scale Political Movement in Hong Kong(H. Liang; G. Tang; F. Lee)

Applying computer vision in communication research

(25-May-2019 2:00 PM-3:15 PM, Morgan (Washington Hilton, Lobby Level))

• Mechanisms of Collective Action: Measuring the Role of Violence, Identity, and Free-riding Using Geolocated Images(J. Joo; Z. Steinert-Threlkeld; D. Won)
• Combining Machine Vision and Text Mining on Websites: Toward an Approach for Automated Multimodal Content Analysis(I. Lock; T. Araujo)
• Is the Picture in Focus? Images in Social Movement Mobilization(A. Casas; N. Webb Williams; K. M. Aslett; J. D. Wilkerson)
• The Use of Computer Vision to Analyze Visual Brand-related User Generated Content: A Comparison of YOLOV2, Google Cloud Vision, and Clarifai(A. Nanne; M. L. Antheunis; G. Noort; S. Wubben; E. Postma)
• The Face of News in America: Applying Machine Vision to News Images(O. Lam; S. J. Wojcik; B. Broderick; A. G. Hughes)
• How People Use Pictures in Political Protests and Why It Matters(H. Zhang; Y. Peng)

Network dynamics on social media

(25-May-2019 3:30 PM-4:45 PM, Oaklawn (Washington Hilton, Lobby Level))

• Niche News and Peripheral Fragmentation: A Network Percolation Approach to the Analysis of News Consumption(T. Yang; S. Majo-Vazquez; S. Mukerjee; S. Gonzalez-Bailon)
• Dynamics and Structure of Research Coverage across Online Media(I. Zakhlebin; A. Horvat)
• Revisiting Ideological Segregation on the Web: A Block Model Approach to Audience Network Data(A. Y. Zhou; S. Gonzalez-Bailon)
• Core-Periphery Decomposition of Networked Publics and Counterpublics(R. J. Gallagher; B. Foucault Welles)
• Predicting Reposting Latency of News Content in Social Media: A Focus on Issue Attention, Temporal Usage Pattern, and Information Redundancy(L. Guan; H. Liang; J. Zhu)

Inductive and deductive methods for text analysis

(26-May-2019 8:00 AM-9:15 AM, Van Ness (Washington Hilton, First Floor))

• When Does Garbage Stink? Imperfect Gold Standards and the Validation of Automated Content Analysis(H. Song; P. Tolochko; J. Eberl; F. Lind; T. Heidenreich; O. Eisele; E. Greussing; H. G. Boomgaarden)
• Identification of Nationalist and Populist Emotions in Social Media: Based a New Massive Text Annotation Approach for Deep Learning(A. CHEN; Y. Hu; Q. Wu)
• Exploring Topics Associations in Political News(Y. Fogel-Dror; S. Shenhav; T. Sheafer)
• Mediated Morality on Twitter: Applying Distributed Dictionary Representation(Y. Chen; s. sun)
• Computational methods for inductively extracting media frames: a comparative analysis(T. Nicholls)

Combating misinformation

(26-May-2019 9:30 AM-10:45 AM, Columbia 6 (Washington Hilton, Terrace Level))

• The Electoral Dimension of Disinformation: Political Astroturfing on Twitter(J. Yang; F. Keller; D. Schoch; S. Stier)
• Misinformation, Modularity, and Bot Zealots in the Wisdom of the Crowds(E. M. Forbush; D. R. Guilbeault; J. Gursky; D. Centola)
• An Exploration of Fact-checking in Political Discussions on Reddit(D. Margolin; D. Parekh; D. Ruths)
• Do I sound American? Predicting Disinformation Sharing of Russian IRA tweets from a Linguistic Perspective(J. Suk; J. Lukito; M. Su; S. Kim; C. Tong; Z. Sun; P. Sarma)
• Crowdsourcing and Computer-assisted Analysis in Fact-checking: Insights from A Reddit Community(M. Yousuf; N. Hassan; M. Haque; J. Rivas; M. Islam)
• Social media data as a window on disinformation campaign strategies(D. J. Ruck; A. Bentley; N. M. Rice; S. Allard; O. Manaev; C. Luther)
• Buzzword “Fake News“ – Analyzing how commenters of a leading news forum use the term fake news via automated content analysis(S. Boberg; T. Schatto-Eckrodt; F. Wintterlin; T. Quandt)

Reflections on computational communication research

(26-May-2019 11:00 AM-12:15 PM, International Ballroom – East (Washington Hilton, Concourse Level))

• The Temporal Turn in Communication Research:
  Time-Series Analyses Using Computational Approaches(C. Wells; D. V. Shah; J. C. Pevehouse; J. M. Foley; A. Pelled; J. Yang)
• Towards a Stronger Theoretical Grounding of Computational Communication Science: A Review of Tried and Tested Social Theories(A. Waldherr; S. Geise; M. Mahrt; C. Katzenbach; C. Nuernbergk)
• Discovering research topics in the communication field from 1997-2017 using structural topic modeling (STM)(C. Lim; M. Park; Y. Baek)
• Pathways to access and acquire large data sets in communication science(S. Bruns; D. Possler; J. Niemann-Lenz)
• Understanding Supply and Demand in Communication Research: A Computational Approach(C. Grill; C. Chan)
• Geographical Location of Institutional Affiliation and Publication Types of Editors and Editorial Board Members in the Field of Communication(S. Youk; H. Park; J. Ryu; J. Lim; J. Han)

Beyond text analysis: Combining text, network, and image analysis techniques

(27-May-2019 8:00 AM-9:15 AM, International Ballroom – Center (Washington Hilton, Concourse Level))

• From word vectors to cluster networks – an analysis of semantic fields in social media discussions using Word2vec, clustering and network analysis(S. Laaksonen; J. Pääkkönen; M. Jauho; V. Isotalo; M. Nelimarkka)
• A MULTI-METHOD APPROACH FOR IDENTIFYING AND GROUPING FRAME ELEMENTS WITH TOPIC MODELING AND NETWORK ANALYSIS(D. Walter; Y. Ophir)
• Automated Coding of Televised Leader Displays:
  A Computational Approach to Nonverbal Communication Research(J. Joo)
• Blurring the Boundaries between Content Analysis and Reception Studies: Towards a Typology of Journalistic Articles’ Lifespans on Twitter(D. Compagno; B. Conan-Guez)
• CASM: A Deep-Learning Approach for Identifying Collective Action Events with Text and Image Data from Social Media(J. Pan; H. Zhang)
• Can You Hear the Echo? – Combining Sentiment and Social Network Analyses to Measure Opinion-Based Homogeneity in Social Media(D. Röchert; G. Neubaum; B. Ross; F. Brachten; S. Stieglitz)

Computational approaches to health communication

(27-May-2019 9:30 AM-10:45 AM, Holmead (Washington Hilton, Lobby Level))

• Extended Abstract: First step towards an automated personalized persuasive conversational system: Investigating moderating effects of psychological factors(J. Zhang; Y. Oh; X. Wang; R. Kim; S. Yang; Z. Yu)
• Detecting Intentional Self-Harm on Instagram: Development, Test, and Validation of an Automatic Image Recognition Algorithm to Discover Cutting-Related Posts(S. Scherr; F. Arendt; T. Frissen; J. M. Oramas)
• More Connected but not More Productive: Analyzing Support for Interpersonal Communication in Wikis(N. E. TeBlunthuis; S. Narayan; W. Hale; B. Hill; A. Shaw)
• Predicting health behavior change through automated content analysis of a peer-to-peer online forum: Application of supervised machine learning to substance use disorder recovery(R. F. Kornfield; y. liu; M. Chih; P. Sarma; D. V. Shah)
• Identifying the social role of superusers in an online health social news community: A network analysis of r/health(W. Li; W. Wang; R. Bond)

Computational Methods Tool Demonstration

(27-May-2019 11:00 AM-12:15 PM, Kalorama (Washington Hilton, Lobby Level))

• Increasing the Transparency of Big Text Data Collection in Computational Communication Science: Tools and Best Practices(E. Rinke; T. Dobbrick)
• Measuring News Exposure using Surveys and Digital Trace Data: Exploring new connections and divergences(E. Menchen-Trevino; M. Wojcieszak; J. F. Gonçalves; B. Weeks)
• Extracting semantic relations using syntax: an R package for
  querying and reshaping dependency trees.(K. Welbers; W. van Atteveldt; J. Kleinnijenhuis)
• Agent-based testing: An automated approach toward artificial reactions to human behavior(M. Haim)
• A Character Recognition Tool for Automated Content Analysis: A Facial Recognition Approach to Visual Content(J. Baldwin; R. Schmaelzle)
• Tool demo: RISJbot – a web crawler for collecting structured news article content at scale(T. Nicholls)
• Going beyond the wizard: Using computational methods for conversational agent communication research(T. Araujo)
• 3bij3 – A framework for testing effects of recommender systems on news exposure(F. Loecherbach; D. Trilling)

Computational Methods Interactive Poster Session

(27-May-2019 12:30 PM-1:45 PM, International Terrace (Interactive Posters) (Washington Hilton, Terrace Level))

• What Words Are Worth: National Science Foundation Grant Abstracts Indicate Award Funding(D. M. Markowitz)
• Marketing Virtual Reality Games with Text: A Text Mining Analysis of Game Descriptions on Steam(J. C. Ho; X. Zhang)
• Harnessing Collective Intelligence to Improve Decision-Making: Predicting Long-Term Success in P2P Lending(H. K. Dambanemuya; A. Horvat)
• Understanding Public Opinion in Different Disaster Stages: A Case Study of Hurricane Irma(Z. Xu; K. Lachlan; L. Ellis; A. M. Rainear)
• Ethnography of/in/through digital platforms: opportunities and challenges(A. Lusoli; F. Lesage)
• Putting Your Best Pet Forward: Writing Style Predicts Duration of Pet Adoption(D. M. Markowitz)

Computational approaches to mobile communication

(28-May-2019 8:00 AM-9:15 AM, Columbia 9 (Washington Hilton, Terrace Level))

• Balancing the Facts: The Sequencing of Thinking and Feeling on Mobile Phone Screens(N. Ram; M. Cho; B. Reeves; X. Yang)
• Time Pattern of Mobile News Consumption(Y. LIU)
• How do people use their smartphone? A data scientific approach to describe and identify user-related, system-related and context-related patterns in use(A. Hendrickson; L. De Marez; M. Martens; G. Muller; K. Ponnet; C. Schweitzer; M. M. Vanden Abeele)
• Sequence Analysis of Media Use Data: Finding Patterns in Repetitive and Burst-like sequences(M. Wettstein)
• Gathering Mobile News Consumption Traces: An Overview of Possibilities and a Prototype Tool based on Google Takeout(W. van Atteveldt; L. Bogaardt; V. van Hees; F. Loecherbach; J. Moeller; D. Trilling; K. Welbers)

Simulation studies of communication

(28-May-2019 9:30 AM-10:45 AM, Kalorama (Washington Hilton, Lobby Level))

• An Evolutionary Model of the Emergence of Meanings(P. Oh; S. Kim)
• The Network Dynamics of Conventions(J. A. Becker)
• From the body, to the mind, to the public: An agent-based model of media effects on public opinion dynamics(H. Yan; J. Shanahan; A. Lang)
• Networking Strategies at the Trade-off Between Individual and System-level Efficiency(K. Tanaka; A. Horvat)
• Spiral of Silence in the Social Media Era: A Simulation Approach to the Interplay between Social Networks and Mass Media(D. Sohn)
• Chambers without Echoes: Computational and Experimental Evidence on Information Propagation in Homogeneous Networks(S. Kim)

Trolls, fake accounts and censorship

(28-May-2019 11:00 AM-12:15 PM, Monroe (Washington Hilton, Concourse Level))

• • If it Behaves Like a Troll, it is a Troll! A Computational Mechanics Approach to Trolling and its Contagion(Q. Sun; M. Hilbert)
  • Issue Competition on Social Media in China: The Interplay Among Media, Verified Users, and Unverified Users(P. Wang)
  • Content Censorship of WeChat Public Account: a five-month preliminary analysis(K. Fu; Y. Tai)
  • “Are they all fake?” A machine learning approach to classify fake followers of US politicians on Twitter(B. Kiessling; T. Drozdzynski; S. Burkhardt; J. Schacht; H. Klimpe)
  • Two Applications of Statistical Relational Learning: Fake News Detection and Congress Voting Patterns(Q. Hao; T. Peng)
  • The Role of Suspended Accounts in Political Discussion on Social Media: Analysis of the 2017 French, UK and German Elections(S. Majo-Vazquez; M. Congosto; T. Nicholls; R. Nielsen)

The Computational Methods Interest Group of ICA will hold elections this fall for the Vice Chair and Secretary positions. Please consider running for either position.

The Vice Chair position is a two-year term, which will involve group planning for the 2018 conference in Prague and the 2019 conference in Washington, DC. After ICA 2019, the Vice Chair will automatically assume the Chair position and become a representative on the ICA Board of Directors for an additional two years. In total, this position will involve just under four years of service from November 2017 until May 2021.

The Secretary position is a two-year term, which begins after ICA 2018 and ends after ICA 2020. Responsibilities include keeping and disseminating minutes of the group business meeting held during the annual conference, maintaining the group web pages and social media, managing communication within the group, and working with the Vice Chair and Chair to handle group matters.

Becoming active in the Interest Group is a great way to shape the future of our Group and to build your network and CV. Attendance at the annual conference is expected while a division officer.

If you are interested in running for either position, please send your name, affiliation and a brief (max 300-word) motivation/vision statement to Wouter van Atteveldt (wouter@vanatteveldt.com) *before July 27*. Also feel free to contact Wouter if you have any question about either position.

Thanks,

Wouter van Atteveldt (chair)
Frederik de Grove (secretary)

Fri, May 26, 14:00 to 15:15, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, 3, Aqua 309

In this session we will demonstrate new tools and software that can be used to analyse communication. The setup is that all speakers will give a very brief presentation and then setup an interactive demo so you can see the tool in action and ask more detailed questions.

The lineup: [Download slides here]

• Collecting and Analyzing Social Media Data Using SocialMediaLab – Timothy John Graham, The Australian National U; Robert Ackland, Australian National U
• Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) – Robert Ackland, Australian National U
• Same, Same? Ensuring Comparative Equivalence in the Semantic Analysis of Heterogeneous, Multilingual Corpora – Christian Baden, Hebrew U of Jerusalem
• Automatic Text Analysis Made Easy: Using AmCAT, NLPipe, and R to Do Corpus Management, Linguistic Processing, and Automatic Text Analysis – Wouter van Atteveldt; Kasper Welbers, U of Leuven; Antske Fokkens, VU U Amsterdam; Nel Ruigrok, LJS Media Research; Martijn Bastiaan, U of Copenhagen; Christian Stuart, U of Amsterdam
• Facebook Page Data Extraction for Nonprogrammers: Introducing the Netvizz and Facepager Tools – Michael Che Ming Chan, Chinese U of Hong Kong
• Corpustools: An R Package for Text Analysis Beyond Bags of Words – Kasper Welbers, U of Leuven; Wouter van Atteveldt

Here is an overview of the very exciting lineup of Computational Methods panels at ICA in San Diego the coming days:

Friday
08:00 Applications of Topic Modeling
11:00 Computational methods in Journalism
12:30 Computational methods Poster Session
14:00 New Software and Tools for Analyzing Communication
15:30 What Computational Methods contribute to Communication Research
17:00 Business Meeting

Saturday
08:00 Automatic Sentiment Analysis
09:39 Semantics and Structure of Online Communication
12:30 Temporal and Spatial Analysis of Mobility Data

Sunday
11:00 Advances in Text Analysis Methods
14:00 Network Methods for Communication Research
17:00 Computational Methods for Analyzing Visual and Online Communication
18:30 Joint reception @ Quad Ale House

Monday
14:00 Advances in Network Analysis
15:30 Computational Methods for Studying Political Communication

Two gentle reminders: please consider nominating someone or yourself for the  positions for vice-char and secretary of the interest group and consider submitting your papers to the special issue on Computational Methods of CMM (deadline: 1st of July)

ICA San Diego is fast approaching and we are looking forward to seeing your presentations and hearing what your latest results and plans are!

This newsletter contains a number of important points: election of a new vice-chair and a new secretary, the upcoming CMM and AJoC special issues, conference update, and the agenda for the business meeting.

Call for nominations, vice-chair and secretary

We need to elect a new vice-chair to take office immediately after the October elections and a new secretary to take office at ICA 2018. Both positions are for two years. The vice-chair will be in charge of conference planning for the 2018 and 2019 conferences and will then assume the position of chair for another two years. The secretary will be in charge of communication which is a great way to getting to know the group (and to get known by the group). The deadline for nominations will be in the summer and self-nominations are welcome. Feel free to approach us in San Diego for more information.

Special issues

As a reminder:  Communication Methods and Measures will have a special issue coming up on computational methods. It is an open call, but we hope that you will consider submitting your best work from this ICA to the special issue. See http://ica-cm.org/cfp-computational-methods/

Asian Journal of Communication will have a special issue focusing on computational communication research in Asia-Pacific contexts. See http://weblab.com.cityu.edu.hk/blog/blog/2017/04/13/call-for-papers%EF%BC%9Aa-special-issue-of-asian-journal-of-communication/.

Conference update

A lot of you will be presenting papers at the conference in San Diego. All chairs are requested to mail their participants with a deadline for circulating their updated papers, especially for the people who submitted an (extended) abstract. Make sure to note whether you are presenting in a regular panel or in a high-density sessions.

Business meeting

Below is a preliminary agenda for the 2017 business meeting. Please mail us if there are any additional points you would like to add to the agenda.

1. 2016-2017 Interest group report and finances
2. Conference evaluation: which panel types did we like best, and which can be improved? Was it a good idea to accept abstract submissions?
3. Membership recruitment: we are delighted to have well over 150 members now! However, if we want to be recognized as a division, we will have to continue our drive to recruit members, both within ICA and outside.
4. Plans for the coming year(s):
   1. Review process: we would like to make some changes to the review process, in particularly to (1) make every submitting first author automatically a reviewer; and (2) organize a paper bidding process where reviewers can select which papers they would like to review based on the title (this is common in computer science conferences and ensures that you actually get to review interesting papers!)
   2. Best article/dissertation/reviewer award. We should have some budget next year to instate rewards, but this will require someone volunteering to form an awards committee.
   3. Regional conference(s) and preconference(s). If you have any plans to organize either a regional conference or a preconference, please let us know so we can help you get setup.
   4. Setting up a working group for starting up tool repository. We aim for a group of three people that will manage things in collaboration with the (vice)chair and secretary. Feel free to volunteer or approach us in San Diego for more information.

Date: May 25th 2017, 9:00-17:00 (ICA San Diego)
Full program: ICA_TMPA_program

Talks and slides:

Dr. Hai Liang: Scraping and preprocessing of social media data
Dr. Molly Roberts: Structural Topic Modelling
Dr. Andrew Schwartz: Machine learning on social media textual data for predicting psychological and health outcomes
Dr. Daniel Angus: Emerging methods for text visualization
Dr. Justin Grimmer: Statistical Models for Computational textual analysis and applications

Abstract: Manual content analysis has been one of the most distinctive and influential techniques in communication research for more than half a century. With the rise of digital and social media, recent years have seen a sharp growth in the sheer amount and types of textual data communication scholars often wish to explore, as well as changes to required skillsets needed for acquiring, storing, and processing data. Due to these changes researchers in communication often find manual content analysis methods inadequate for their needs. As a result, computational approaches to text mining are becoming gradually more valuable and even necessary for contemporary communication scholars. The pre-conference workshop “Computational tools for text mining, processing and analysis” aims to engage with these computational methods.

This pre-conference offers five talks given by world-class experts working at the frontier of computational textual analysis: Hai Liang, Molly Roberts, Andres Schwartz, Daniel Angus and Justin Grimmer. The program covers both introductory materials aimed at providing less experienced scholars with practical tools for analysis, as well as in-depth critical discussions on advanced issues including assumptions, properties, inferences, triangulation with other methods, and theory development. At the concluding panel, the invited speakers, panelists and the audience will engage in a discussion about the future of computational textual analysis in communication research and social science in general. Confirmed panelists include Dr. Joseph Cappella (the Gerald R. Miller Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania) and Dr. Dhavan Shah (the Louis A. & Mary E. Maier-Bascom Professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison).

It is our hope that participants will leave this full-day workshop not only with ready-to-use tools for their day-to-day research but also with a more comprehensive understanding of these methods’ assumptions, properties, theories and debates. The goal is to promote not only the usage, but a responsible usage, of computational methods for textual analysis.

Full program: ICA_TMPA_program

First of all, we would like to wish you all a happy and productive 2017!

ICA will send out the acceptance decisions and reviews early this year, but we wanted to already express our  thanks to all submitters and especially the reviewers for helping us create a great program for ICA 2017.

We received over a hundred submissions, which is a fantastic score for a new interest group!
With the help of the reviewers, we were able to accept just under 50% of them, and decided on three different session formats to host them:

• An interactive software demonstration session,
• A number of regular panels on various methodological challenges,
• And a set of high-density sessions on applications of computational methods to the various substantive communication fields.

We really look forward to seeing all of you in San Diego, and thanks so much for your ideas, submissions, and reviews, your efforts are crucial in establishing our interest group!

As you have no doubt heard by now, the deadline for submissions to ICA has been extended to November 5th, 23:55 UTC. The system has been having technical problems due to hacking, but seems to be up again.

For all Group members that are interested in submitting, we would like to urge you to try to submit as soon as you are ready. If you can’t log on to the system or experience other technical problems in submitting your work, please just try again the next day.

Of course, these extra days also give you the time to prepare another submissions. Remember, the Computational Methods group accepts full papers and extended abstracts on new methods, applications, tool demonstrations, and much more! See http://ica-cm.org/cfp2017/ for our full call for papers.

Good luck finalizing your submissions, and don’t hesitate to email wouter@vanatteveldt.com if you have any questions.

Dear members of ICA CM interest group,