Workshop:
- GRADUATE STUDENT RESEARCH WORKSHOP:Twitter, networks, and space
- June 20-24: June 20-24 – Intense week-long introduction with daily meetings 9am-noon
- June 27 – Aug. 5 – Independent/group work with weekly check-ins, collaborative writing, access to support from workshop team/GRA
- Week of Aug. 8-12 – Closing session with presentation of results, next steps.
- Weekly meeting times will be determined based on participant preference.
- With their large memberships and international presence, social media sites such as twitter and Facebook clearly have some impact on people’s real-world experiences. Yet, research on how data from these media can be used to investigate phenomena like social movements, events, information transmission, is still in its infancy. Additionally, techniques for gathering social network data are still being developed. This summer a research workshop will be offered by the departments of geography and sociology in conjunction with an NSF funded research grant. The purpose of this course is to introduce a select group of participants to advanced data gathering techniques using Twitter feeds, key word searches and network analysis. Participants will learn these advanced techniques through participation in a dual level research project that will examine two distinct phenomena. • Twitter feeds as content analysis and social movement tracking. • Twitter networks as a test of closure, penetration and brokerages. Over the course of eight weeks participants will investigate and learn fundamentals of social networks and geospatial analysis, how to generate twitter queries, clean network data, content code feeds and perform network analysis.
Workshop
- Rentierism in the Middle East Workshop: Feb 24-25.
Michael Ross
Michael Ross is a professor of political science at UCLA. He studies a range of issues that concern the developing world; he has a special interest in political economy, natural resource issues, democratization, and the states of Southeast Asia. His book Timber Booms and Institutional Breakdown in Southeast Asia was published in 2001 by Cambridge University Press, in their Political Economy of Institutions and Decisions series. His current work includes research on the problems of states that have an abundance of natural resources (the “resource curse”); the breakdown of authoritarianism in Indonesia; Indonesia’s conflicts in Aceh and Irian Jaya; and the influence of taxation on democratization.
- Public Events:Feb 25 (Friday): 9-12 120 Mershon Center.
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Paper Titles:
J. Craig Jenkins, Katherine Meyer, Matthew Costello and Hassan Aly. “International Rentierism in the Middle East, 1971-2008.”
Matthew Costello “Rentierism and Terrorist Violence: A Global Time-Series Analysis”
Anne Price and Katherine Meyer. “Changing Attitudes on Women’s Right to Employment in the Middle East”
Hyseon Jeong and Ola Ahlqvist “Diaspora Nationalism in Cyberspace: Hyperlink Networks of Kurdish Organizations”
Shawn Fontanella and Ola Ahlqvist “Geomapping of Rentierism and Conflict in the Middle East”
Matt Stearmer “Divergent Patterns of Turkish Women’s NGO Growth: An Exploration of Two Explanations of Network Growth”
Michael Ross “The Social and Political Consquences of Oil Economies”
Training:
- Spatial Mapping and Modeling Techniques for the Middle East June through August, 2010.
- Using data gathered on rentier status and migration, principal investigators and graduate researchers work with ArcGIS 9.3 using data from 19 Middle East states.