JITP 2011 Sponsors

The Third Annual Journal of Information Technology & Politics Conference
May 16 & 17, 2011 – University of Washington - Seattle, WA

JITP 2011 Poster Presenter: Amoshaun Toft, University of Washington

Title: "Leveraging computational social science by combining hyperlink and textual analyses: The case of online anti-human trafficking networks"           

Amoshaun Toft's research centers on the space between language use, technologies of communication, social organization, and political action. His dissertation, “Social movement communication: Language, technology, and social organization in an urban homeless movement,” addressed the need for research that specifies how participants use language as an organizing tool, mobilize digital communication resources in organizing processes, and build social organizations that can foster effective movement dynamics. He is interested in what political actions “mean” to participants, policymakers, and publics, how issue contexts structure political affordances, and how activists use communication in the process of organizing for social change. Areas of research interest include: media studies, discourse and language, technology and society, organizational communication, network studies, political communication, social movements, poverty and homelessness, immigration, and human trafficking.
 

Abstract: The anti-human trafficking movement has emerged as a dynamic collection of NGOs, businesses, governmental, and international agencies. Similarly to actors in other issue movements, anti-trafficking actors often employ web technologies to represent their affiliations and offline actions. Two primary approaches have become prominent in research on online issue movements: textual analysis and hyperlink analysis. Textual analysis of website content allows researchers to focus on a variety of rhetorical and discursive elements, including the narrative dimensions of collective action-- while computational network analysis of hyperlink formations enables understanding of the structural-relational architecture of an issue movement. However, few studies of large-scale online issue networks have combined computational link analysis with methods that require human interpretation, such as web real estate analysis or narrative analysis.
In this poster we leverage our ongoing work on the anti-human trafficking movement to demonstrate the affordances of this particular multi-method approach for researching online issue networks. Strategies for multilevel analysis and representation will be presented examining the relationship between hyperlink network configurations (such as density, centrality, indegree/outdegree, and brokerage roles) and anti-trafficking website producers’ attributes such as the primacy of the issue for the producer, producers’ textual claims about network/alliance/coalition relationships, and the prevalence and robustness of issue-relevant activities reported by producers. In moving between textual characteristics and hyperlink network relations, we suggest that researchers are better equipped to make sense of complex movement dynamics and begin to understand how transnational issue networks make use of digital tools to build social movements.
 

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