Representations of Governmental Websites on Social Media

Team Members

Marije Rooze, Burak Dogu

Introduction

This study is mainly interested in the connections of governmental websites to social networking websites. Since the social networking websites form a kind of virtual public sphere, it is important to know their roles in content sharing. From this point of view, we are mainly interested in the type of relationship between the two sides.

Research Questions

The aim of this project is to find an answer to how social media connects to the information provided by the governmental iniative. In particular, we are interested in observing the kind of representations that are shared through the social media.

Method

In the frame of the case regarding BP oil spill, we extracted the URLs from the mainpages of the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administratio) and NLM (National Library of Medicine) websites which are thought to be confidential.

Then the URLs were put to Issuecrawler to generate a map of the websites connected to the case study. In this phase, various settings were used for the Issuecrawler in order to get the most useful map.

Using the Issuecrawler, the startingpoints and network URLs were retrieved.

Backtype Stats tool was used to find out the number of tweets made via the URLs.

URL Linter tool was used to get the 'like' counts.

Finally, using Adobe Illustrator the collected data were merged with the map provided by the Issuecrawler.

Findings

Issues and Limitations

The main fact that can be taken as a limitation is the social user activities. Because it was not possible to observe all kinds of activities done by the users. For instance, this study was not able to point out to the discussions in which the active users were involved.

Further Research

Further research should be done on various cases to compare the findings from this study.