The Pacific-Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) leads research dedicated to information science on the Pacific Asia region, and is the only Association for Information Systems (AIS) conference dedicated to the region. This year, the theme was “Preparing The Next Generation For The IT-Driven Future”: in the context of emerging technologies that are reshaping industries and societies, information systems education must evolve with the landscape—ensuring young individuals are prepared to embrace and lead changes in the field. To bridge the gap between traditional education and changing IT demands, the conference focused on innovative teaching methods, advanced curriculum design, and a collaboration between academia and industry.

From 1 to 5 July 2024, the 28th PACIS conference was held in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Cosmographers presented their research titled, “Detecting Influential Nodes with the South China Sea on Instagram.” This study presents a detailed analysis of the influential entities within the social media discourse surrounding the South China Sea (SCS) conflict. Notably, this analysis combined traditional network analysis and topic modeling with the novel contextual focal structure analysis (CFSA) to investigate the themes and influential users behind Instagram discussions and narratives on the conflict—analysis which used hashtags related to the SCS to form a dataset of over 70,000 records. Combining these three methods, the authors looked at the multi-dimensional nature of user interactions and influence.

Using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), a topic modeling method, the authors identified six sub-topics within the SCS discussion, and on closer inspection identified two salient topics: geopolitical conflict and territorial claims, and military activities and preparedness. Hashtag co-occurrence also confirmed prominence of hashtags related to conflict and territorial claims, more specifically the struggle between China and other international players. In addition, network analysis showed a small number of users had a disproportionately high influence on the discourse, characterized by metrics like high degree, eigenvector, and betweenness centralities that indicated central roles in spreading information and connecting separate user groups. CFSA added a deeper dimension to the analysis—representing multiplex network methods that contained multiple layers, such as both hashtag co-occurrence and user networks combined—by identifying discussion on deep-sea mining and Chinese navy operations.

Dr. Agarwal said, “The significance of this study lies in its novel approach to analyzing social media data related to the SCS conflict. By combining topic modeling, network analysis, and CFSA, the study provides a comprehensive understanding of the discourse and influential entities within this critical geopolitical issue. The insights drawn from this research have significant implications for information science, organizational analysis, and strategic decision-making in managing control and responsibilities within social networks.”