BlogTrackers: Analyzing Social Media for Cultural Modeling

Description

This research project is a preliminary joint effort to integrate domain knowledge of a special cultural interest with novel search capabilities for assessing political risks. In particular, this project attempts to address three critical questions in order to stay in the frontier of stability operations in a global, forward-looking view: 1. the importance of the blogosphere to military or stability operations; 2. the significance of the blog research to these operations; and 3. the identification and development of tools of blog tracking and analysis to understand the communities of interest and help advance global security and prosperity. We first provide background information on blogs - Web-based media with increasing popularity among youths all over the world, and on Indonesia – a strategically significant country that serves as a case study for the proposal. Secondly, we illustrate the pressing need for studying the blogosphere as a new dimension for identifying pre-conflict indicators and potential threats. Thirdly, we articulate the demand for novel search capabilities that can integrate domain knowledge in search and scale up with the inordinate number of disconnected blogs of special interests in the digital jungle. Finally, we propose to design, develop, deploy, and evaluate BlogTrackers, a proof-of-concept system that distills and manifests the proposed research tasks and derived results.

TweetTracker

Our latest system TweetTracker focuses on tweets collected from Twitter to support event monitoring and analysis. More information about this project can be found here.

News

Invited Talks by the PI

Talks by Invited Vistors

Publications

Demonstration

BlogTrackers can be used in many different scenarios. The following videos show BlogTrackers describing two news stories in the Indonesian blogosphere.

PDFTracker

PDFTracker helps a user to parse, store, and analyze PDF (Portable Document Format) documents. PDF is a very flexible and convenient format that is widely used for storing documents. PDF Tracker makes searching and analyzing PDF documents easier.

Download the Demo version of PDFTracker here
User manual for the tool is available here
PDF document corpus used in the demo version of the tool can be downloaded here

Project Members (current and former)

Acknowledgments

This project is sponsored by ONR grant N000141410095

Created on August 1, 2008.
Contact: Huan Liu.


Last Updated: March 10, 2015