Digital Roots


Book Description

As media environments and communication practices evolve over time, so do theoretical concepts. This book analyzes some of the most well-known and fiercely discussed concepts of the digital age from a historical perspective, showing how many of them have pre-digital roots and how they have changed and still are constantly changing in the digital era. Written by leading authors in media and communication studies, the chapters historicize 16 concepts that have become central in the digital media literature, focusing on three main areas. The first part, Technologies and Connections, historicises concepts like network, media convergence, multimedia, interactivity and artificial intelligence. The second one is related to Agency and Politics and explores global governance, datafication, fake news, echo chambers, digital media activism. The last one, Users and Practices, is finally devoted to telepresence, digital loneliness, amateurism, user generated content, fandom and authenticity. The book aims to shed light on how concepts emerge and are co-shaped, circulated, used and reappropriated in different contexts. It argues for the need for a conceptual media and communication history that will reveal new developments without concealing continuities and it demonstrates how the analogue/digital dichotomy is often a misleading one.




User-Generated Content and its Impact on Branding


Book Description

The emergence of social media as one of the driving forces of consumers’ online experiences today also challenges our current understanding on marketing and brand management. The effects of brands’ social media involvement are to this day uncertain. Severin Dennhardt shows that social media and user-generated brands do have a strong influence on brands. Four independent studies demonstrate that first, successful brands can be created in virtual worlds, second, user-generated content drives the creation of unique brands, third social media strongly influences the social value perception of brands, and fourth, social media impacts consumers’ purchase decision process.




Mining User Generated Content


Book Description

Originating from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and many other networking sites, the social media shared by users and the associated metadata are collectively known as user generated content (UGC). To analyze UGC and glean insight about user behavior, robust techniques are needed to tackle the huge amount of real-time, multimedia, and multilingual data. Researchers must also know how to assess the social aspects of UGC, such as user relations and influential users. Mining User Generated Content is the first focused effort to compile state-of-the-art research and address future directions of UGC. It explains how to collect, index, and analyze UGC to uncover social trends and user habits. Divided into four parts, the book focuses on the mining and applications of UGC. The first part presents an introduction to this new and exciting topic. Covering the mining of UGC of different medium types, the second part discusses the social annotation of UGC, social network graph construction and community mining, mining of UGC to assist in music retrieval, and the popular but difficult topic of UGC sentiment analysis. The third part describes the mining and searching of various types of UGC, including knowledge extraction, search techniques for UGC content, and a specific study on the analysis and annotation of Japanese blogs. The fourth part on applications explores the use of UGC to support question-answering, information summarization, and recommendations.




Participate


Book Description

Creativity is no longer the sole territory of the designer and other creative professionals. Amateurs are drawn to websites such as Flickr, Threadless, WordPress, YouTube, Etsy, and Lulu, approaching design with the expectation that they will fill in the content. Never has user-driven design been easier for the public to generate and distribute. How will such a fundamental shift toward bottom-up creation affect the design industry? Designing for Participatory Culture considers historical and contemporary models of making that provide ideas for harnessing user-generated content through participatory design. The authors discuss how designers can lead the new breed of widely distributed amateur creatives rather than be overrun by them. DPC challenges designers to transform audiences into users, and completed layouts into open-ended systems. The book opens with an introductory essay entitled 'Ceding Control,' which explores the general concept of participatory culture and the resulting emergence of systems-oriented models of co-creation. Four chapters Modularity, Flexibility, Community, and Technology explore the various approaches to participatory design through critical essays, case studies, and interviews with leading designers in the field.




Social Media


Book Description

The increasing amount of user-generated content available on social media platforms requires new methods to find, evaluate, and to compare. To this day, existing ranking approaches to user-generated content do not allow for evaluation across platforms by exploiting its metadata. User-generated content, such as blog postings, forum discussions, shared videos etc. does however contain information that can be used for its evaluation independent of specific search interests. Claudia Wyrwoll presents a query- and language-independent ranking approach that allows for global evaluation of user-generated content across different platforms. Building on an insightful introduction into social media fundamentals, she proposes new models describing phenomena associated with social media, laying the foundation for further research and development.




Urban Informatics


Book Description

This open access book is the first to systematically introduce the principles of urban informatics and its application to every aspect of the city that involves its functioning, control, management, and future planning. It introduces new models and tools being developed to understand and implement these technologies that enable cities to function more efficiently – to become ‘smart’ and ‘sustainable’. The smart city has quickly emerged as computers have become ever smaller to the point where they can be embedded into the very fabric of the city, as well as being central to new ways in which the population can communicate and act. When cities are wired in this way, they have the potential to become sentient and responsive, generating massive streams of ‘big’ data in real time as well as providing immense opportunities for extracting new forms of urban data through crowdsourcing. This book offers a comprehensive review of the methods that form the core of urban informatics from various kinds of urban remote sensing to new approaches to machine learning and statistical modelling. It provides a detailed technical introduction to the wide array of tools information scientists need to develop the key urban analytics that are fundamental to learning about the smart city, and it outlines ways in which these tools can be used to inform design and policy so that cities can become more efficient with a greater concern for environment and equity.




User Generated Branding


Book Description

From a brand management perspective Ulrike Arnhold analyses the impact of interactive marketing programmes in Web 2.0, evaluating user generated content as a tool of the brand communication mix.




Digital Storytelling


Book Description

Did you know that consumers find user-generated content almost ten times more impactful than scripted content marketing? More memorable than other types of media, user-generated content (UGC) influences how we vote, how we choose new shows to watch, and even affects our sense of reality. With the amount of personal narrative-driven UGC we consume, it's worth asking, "Do we know who's creating the content we love on social media?" In Digital Storytelling: The Rise of User-Generated Content, marketing expert Karam Singh Sethi outlines three types of storytellers: The Nefarious Storyteller (criminals and sometimes politicians), The Socially-Conscious Storyteller (activists and entrepreneurs), and The Self-Infatuated Storyteller (reality TV stars and big brands), providing a structure in which to analyze content creators. In this book you will learn: How to become a more discerning social media user How to break into the field of marketing What types of storytellers exist in business, politics, and popular culture How to tell authentic stories for personal life and business The current state of the digital ecosystem has allowed for a unique opportunity. If we can better understand the current creator economy, we can become more conscious content consumers and empower creators that better align with our values.




Multimodal Analysis of User-Generated Multimedia Content


Book Description

This book presents a summary of the multimodal analysis of user-generated multimedia content (UGC). Several multimedia systems and their proposed frameworks are also discussed. First, improved tag recommendation and ranking systems for social media photos, leveraging both content and contextual information, are presented. Next, we discuss the challenges in determining semantics and sentics information from UGC to obtain multimedia summaries. Subsequently, we present a personalized music video generation system for outdoor user-generated videos. Finally, we discuss approaches for multimodal lecture video segmentation techniques. This book also explores the extension of these multimedia system with the use of heterogeneous continuous streams.




Leveraging Computer-Mediated Marketing Environments


Book Description

Social media has redefined the way marketers communicate with their customers, giving consumers an advantage that they did not have previously. However, recent issues in online communication platforms have increased the challenges faced by marketers in developing and retaining their customers. Practitioners need to develop effective marketing communication programs that incorporate the meaningful forms of sociality into a customer-driven marketing program. Leveraging Computer-Mediated Marketing Environments discusses the nature of heightened interaction between marketers and consumers in the evolving technological environments, particularly on the central nature of online communities and other emerging technologies on dialogic engagement. Additionally, it aims to examine the relevant roles of online communities and emerging technologies in creating and retaining customers through effective dialogue management. Highlighting brand strategy, e-services, and web analytics, it is designed for marketers, brand managers, business managers, academicians, and students.