Research

This weekend I’ll be at the annual meetings of the International Communication Association meetings in New York. All of the members from my research group will be participating in the conference and we’ll be reporting on several of our projects. Sunday midday we will present a poster summarizing some preliminary findings from our project on cross-ideological conversations among bloggers. I thought I would give a little preview here.

Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com talks about the potential for IT to fragment citizens’ political discussions into isolated conversations. Borrowing from Negroponte, he discusses the potential for people to construct a “Daily Me” of news readings that excludes opposing perspectives. Sunstein argues that for democracy to flourish, it is important that people continue to have conversations with those in disagreement with their positions. However, he is concerned that with the help of filtering out unwanted content people will fragment into enclaves and won’t be exposed to opinions that challenge their positions. The book is an interesting read, but it does not offer any systematic empirical evidence of the claims.

I have been working on a project this past year with Jason Gallo and Sean Zehnder on empirically testing Sunstein’s thesis. We are doing so by analyzing cross-linkages among liberal and political blogs. You may recall that about two months ago Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance came out with a report on “The Political Blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. Election”. My first reaction was one of panic. Here we had been working on our project for months and someone else came out with the results first. However, a closer read made me realize that our project has some unique elements. And if nothing else, seeing that project has made us more careful and critical in our work showing that more research in an area can be fruitful, because hopefully it inspires the agenda to move forward in a productive manner.

[I updated this image on June 1 when I realized the right graph wasn’t displaying exactly what I had described it as.]

Our work has focused on addressing two questions. First, we are interested in seeing the extent to which liberal and conservative bloggers interlink. Second, we want to see what kind of changes we may be able to observe over time. Sunstein’s thesis suggests that we would see very little if any cross-linking among liberal and conservative blogs and the cross-linking would diminish over time. We go about answering these questions using multiple methodologies. We counted links and calculated some measures to see how insular the conversations are within groups of blogs. We also did a content analysis of some of the posts in our sample. We continue to work on this project so these are just preliminary findings.
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Some physicists have come out with a paper on the Eurovision song contest. Of course, we at CT like to be ahead of the curve and thanks to Kieran’s ingenuity reported similar findings over a year ago. So much for this being “new research”.

There has been much excitement about and focus on social networks in the past few years ranging from social networking sites to several high-profile books on the topic.

Interestingly, much of the buzz about recent work covers research by physicists. It’s curious how physicists have expanded their research agenda to cover social phenomena. I thought their realm was the physical world. Of course, since social phenomena are extremely complex to study, as a social scientist, I certainly welcome the extra efforts put into this field of inquiry.

What is less welcomed is watching people reinvent the wheel. Sure, partly it’s an ego thing. But more importantly, it’s unfortunate if the overall goal is scientific progress. Much of the recent work in this area by physicists has completely ignored decades worth of work by social scientists. If we really do live in such a networked world where information is so easy to access, how have these researchers managed to miss all the existing relevant scholarship? Recently Kieran pointed me to an informative graph published by Lin Freeman in his recent book on The Development of Social Network Analysis:

People whose overall work focuses on social networks are represented by white dots, physicists by black ones, others by grey circles. As is clear on the image, the worlds exist in isolation from each other. It would be interesting to see year-of-publication attached to the nodes to see the progression of work.

I have been meaning to write about all of this for a while, but John Scott from the Univ. Essex addressed these issues quite well in some notes he sent to INSNA‘s SOCNET mailing list a few months ago so I will just reproduce those here. (I do so with permission.)

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Yesterday, the Pew Internet and American Life Project released its latest research report, this one on health information-seeking online. The study finds that 80% of users have searched for some type of health information online (it’s worth noting here that “health information” is defined broadly by including searches for diet and exercise or fitness in this category). Regarding material pertaining to a specific disease or medical problem, the survey of 537 users found that two-thirds have used the Internet as a resource.

One of the topics of interest to me in my research is seeing how different types of Internet access may result in different types of Web uses. The report shows that while 87% of those with a broadband connection at home sought some health information online, only 72% of those with a home dial-up connection did so as well. Also, Internet veterans (in this case people who’ve been online for six or more years) are considerably more likely to have engaged in such activity (86%) than those who have 2-3 years of online experience (66%).

Of course, we would need more information about all these users to draw any conclusions regarding the independent effects of certain factors. People who went online later and who don’t have high-speed connections at home may differ from others in various ways (e.g. lower income, lower education), which may then be related to their propensity to search for health information in the first place. Nonetheless, these relationships are interesting to observe. They support my arguments about the potential implications of connectivity quality and experience for types of uses.

The author of the report is Susannah Fox, Pew’s resident expert on the topic. She has been working in this area for several years and has put out other related reports in the past, e.g. one dealing with prescription drugs online and another looking at how users decide whether to trust online information when it comes to health matters.

There’s been a minor “controversy”:http://www.chriscmooney.com/blog.asp?Id=1774 recently over Naomi Oreskes’ literature study in _Science_. Oreske found that of 928 paper abstracts on climate change, taken from the ISI database, precisely none disagreed with the consensus view that anthropogenic climate change is real. Now Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University says that after searching the same database, he’s found 34 article abstracts that “reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the “the observed warming over the last 50 years.”” Peiser wrote a letter to _Science_, putting forward his alternate findings, which Science declined to publish; in Peiser’s view using “a contrived technicality as an excuse.” This has gotten some “attention”:http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/05/01/wglob01.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/05/01/ixworld.html from the Telegraph, which hints at skulduggery and low standards in high scientific places.

Now, however, Tim Lambert has gotten Peiser to cough up the goods – the 34 (now, for some mysterious reason, 33) scientific abstracts that cast doubt on anthropogenic global warming. Tim is “inviting readers”:http://cgi.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/cgi-bin/blog/science/peiser.html?seemore=y#more to go through the abstracts, and record their own conclusions. My take after reading them: the claim that Peiser’s 33 abstracts “reject or doubt the view …” is completely unsustainable. There’s one undoubted rejection of the anthropogenic case (no. 27) – but it comes from that well-known arbiter of peer-reviewed scientific neutrality, the ‘Ad Hoc Committee on Global Climate Issues’ of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists. There are a few others that could be construed as scepticism (the explicit ones appear to be either outdated or else personal views), but the vast majority of the papers that Peiser cites don’t even begin to make any general arguments about global warming, let alone claims that the anthropogenic argument is bogus. Abstracts no. 12, 13 and 25 aren’t even _scientific research_; they appear to be postmodern inquiries into the construction of scientific authority. If I’d been asked (while wearing my hat as a member of GWU’s Center for International Science and Technology Policy) to review Peiser’s letter and evidence for possible publication in a peer-reviewed journal, I’d have rejected them summarily, and made some fairly warm comments in my rejection letter. I’d have done exactly the same if it had been making the opposite argument (that is if Peiser had used similar evidence to argue that there was support for global warming). Simply put, I don’t think Peiser’s evidence even begins to provide proper support for his claims. But, in fairness to Peiser, he’s made the evidence that he’s using publicly available, so you can go over to Tim’s place and take the taste-test for yourself.

Lorelei Kelly at Democracy Arsenal writes:

Two cliches that the conservative movement lives by: “Nature abhors a vacuum” AND “Half of winning is just showing up”. So conservative leaders proceed to destroy public infrastructure–thereby creating a vacuum–and then outsource its replacement to their friends and allies. A great example of this occurred with the “reforms” implemented by the Contract with America–the de facto elimination of much of the cooperative informal infrastructure like staffed caucuses–that helped Members stay educated and also built alliances between Democrats and Republicans on issues of interest (like arms control or the environment). Congressional staff from the old days refer to 1995 as “the lobotomy of Congress”. Gingrich had no need for these informal venues … he consolidated formal power of recognition to himself and simply outsourced substantive policy needs to the Heritage Foundation. The left had nothing similar to Heritage in 1995. Now we’ve got Center for American Progress, but also years of catching up to do.

While Kelly is bang on in her diagnosis, I don’t think that think tanks like the Center for American Progress provide a very good solution, useful though they may be in other senses. Much of the dumbing down of political debate in the last decade was indeed an intended consequence of the Gingrich revolution. Congressional institutions which provided impartial information were axed, and replaced by spin from handpicked “experts” and right wing think-tanks. The prime example was the closing of the Office of Technology Assessment (which had peeved Gingrich by exploding some of the bogus science underpinning the Star Wars initiative). Still, creating “our own” think-tanks isn’t a solution to the underlying problem (although it may be a necessary political strategy). It would be far preferable to try to recreate some of the previously existing infrastructure, as Congressman Rush Holt has proposed (it wasn’t very expensive in the first place). This would make it far more difficult for bullshit artists like Senator James Inhofe to get away with murder on the floor of Congress. Doubtless, this would sometimes prove inconvenient for the left, whenever the existing research or scientific consensus presented awkward or uncomfortable facts for left-wing policy positions. But it would improve the quality of political debate in areas such as stem cell research, global warming and missile defence, where right wing politicians continually and persistently make claims that are bizarrely at odds with the existing body of scientific research.

Chris Mooney has a great piece of investigative reporting at Mother Jones detailing Exxon’s funding of anti-global warming groups ranging from Steven Milloy’s one-man disinformation campaign at junkscience.com to the American Enterprise Institute. Bottom line: there’s now an overwhelming scientific consensus that human caused greenhouse gases are causing the world’s temperature to rise. Many previous skeptics (e.g. BP and Shell) have now been convinced on the basic facts of global warming. Yet Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute, an organization with which Exxon has close links, have sought to cast doubt on this consensus through funding spurious “reports” and other publications that don’t meet the minimal standards to get published in peer-reviewed journals.[1]
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“Tom B,” commenting at Making Light, points us to the Automatic Computer Science Paper Generator, which uses context-free grammar to generate papers, complete with graphs, figures and citations, which can then be submitted to conferences with low or no standards for the papers they accept. Its creators (MIT pranksters) have already succeeded in getting accepted by one conference – if they can raise the money, they intend, Yes Men style, to go there and deliver the paper with straight faces. It seems to me that pranks of this sort (the Atlanta Nights affair also qualifies) have the logic of a reverse Turing test – any conference (or publishing house, or journal, or whatever) which is stupid or unprincipled enough to accept this sort of nonsense is revealing itself to be a fake.

Cosma Shalizi “informs us”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/273.html that the 1973-74 edition of the Dictionary of the History of Ideas is “online”:http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/DicHist/dict.html. Cosma provides pointers to some of the more interesting articles, and notes in passing E.P. Thompson’s dictum that ” to any rational mind, the greater part of the history of ideas is a history of freaks.” While you’re there, be sure to check out his unique take on “Friday cat-blogging”:http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/weblog/271.html.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, Mystery Pollster is a new blog for “Demystifying the Science and Art of Political Polling”. I didn’t find it through Kausfiles or Instapundit, I got the recommendation during a phone conversation with a friend who barely reads blogs… but who does work with surveys herself. The blog should be of interest to data & methods geeks and political junkies alike.

UPDATE: Since a reader completely misunderstood why I happened to mention how I got information about this blog, I thought I should clarify. I mentioned that I did not get it from reading another blog, because I found it interesting that people who do not read blogs are still in the position to recommend blogs these days. For those of us interested in who knows about blogs and who reads them, this is an interesting tidbit.

I was hesitant to blog about technical details of my work here, but then I realized that if my fellow economist and philosopher bloggers can post about the details of their work then why couldn’t the sociology geeks?:) I’ll tuck it below the fold though as it likely only has limited appeal.

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