Blogtrackers is a socio-computational tool that can be employed to track, monitor, and understand blogs, bloggers, and real-time world events. Using award-winning content analysis and network analysis capabilities, users can extract insights like key influencers of the blogosphere. The tool also allows users to comprehend trends, leading narratives, and conduct sentiment analysis on a wide range of subjects.
VTracker is a tool that can track, monitor, and identify influential YouTube groups and content. It allows users to gain insights into content engagement behaviors of individuals via likes, dislikes, comments, replies, shares, etc. Through visual analytics, VTracker can help identify trends, opinions, communities, anomalous behaviors such as bots, spam, trolls, among other capabilities. Users can visualize networks among YouTubers, commenters, and content.
The COVID-19 pandemic has seen the rise of many unique online narratives through social media and other sources. In an effort to inform the general public and with support of the Arkansas Attorney General’s office, our team sought to keep track of narratives for research purposes and provide near-real-time public documentation via a website with two main goals. The first is to track every unique narrative as curated by our analysts. The second goal is to relay recommendations to the State Attorney General on how to detect such misinformation and avoid fraud and scams seeking to profit from this online fear and chaos. This effort showcases a unique collaboration between scientists and policy makers to stem the flow of misinformation during a major public health crisis.
Focal Structure Analysis (FSA) is an algorithm to identify key sets of individuals called focal structures in a social network. These are individuals who collectively organize events, movements, and campaigns, among other complex social processes. The FSA platform allows users to identify focal structures, observe their interactions within the network, and measure their power.