Persistent Misperceptions: Americans’ Misplaced Confidence in Privacy Policies, 2003–2015

This paper examines the persistence of Americans’ misunderstanding of the function of privacy policies. We also identify groups that have misplaced confidence in the privacy policy label and address whether the groups’ patterns of misperception have changed over time. The findings add a new dimension to the argument that the usefulness of privacy policies needs to be reassessed. As a remedy, we call for media literacy programs to address structural features of media systems that lead to broadly held misperceptions such as the one examined here.     

Applying LDA Topic Modeling in Communication Research: Toward a Valid and Reliable Methodology

ABSTRACT

Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic models are increasingly being used in communication research. Yet, questions regarding reliability and validity of the approach have received little attention thus far. In applying LDA to textual data, researchers need to tackle at least four major challenges that affect these criteria: (a) appropriate pre-processing of the text collection; (b) adequate selection of model parameters, including the number of topics to be generated; (c) evaluation of the model’s reliability; and (d) the process of validly interpreting the resulting topics. We review the research literature dealing with these questions and propose a methodology that approaches these challenges. Our overall goal is to make LDA topic modeling more accessible to communication researchers and to ensure compliance with disciplinary standards. Consequently, we develop a brief hands-on user guide for applying LDA topic modeling. We demonstrate the value of our approach with empirical data from an ongoing research project.     

Scaling up Content Analysis

ABSTRACT

Employing a number of different standalone programs is a prevalent approach among communication scholars who use computational methods to analyze media content. For instance, a researcher might use a specific program or a paid service to scrape some content from the Web, then use another program to process the resulting data, and finally conduct statistical analysis or produce some visualizations in yet another program. This makes it hard to build reproducible workflows, and even harder to build on the work of earlier studies. To improve this situation, we propose and discuss four criteria that a framework for automated content analysis should fulfill: scalability, free and open source, adaptability, and accessibility via multiple interfaces. We also describe how to put these considerations into practice, discuss their feasibility, and point toward future developments.     

Overhyped Fad or Missed Opportunity? A History of Academic Libraries and the Social Web

The emergence of social media has radically transformed the way we create and consume information. These changes have in turn given rise to new models of librarianship centered on principles of participation, interaction, and collaboration. Over the last decade, academic libraries have eagerly adopted social media as a means of enhancing services and connecting with a new generation of users. But how exactly has this technology changed libraries? In what ways has the social web transformed library services or our relationships with users? This article attempts to assess the impact of social media on academic libraries in the United States through a review of the literature published since 2005. In particular, it looks at how academic libraries have used social media to improve or develop new services. By comparing published case studies with the theoretical literature, this article seeks to separate theory from practice and determine the extent to which the social web has transformed library practice. The author concludes that, despite several noteworthy examples, the majority of social library applications ultimately fail to live up to the transformative potential promised within the literature and that this failure may have more to do with philosophical rather than technical limitations.     

Placing Facebook

Facebook is challenging professional journalism. These challenges were evident in three incidents from 2016: the allegation that Facebook privileged progressive-leaning news on its trending feature; Facebook’s removal of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Napalm Girl” photo from the pages of prominent users; and the proliferation of “fake news” during the US presidential election. Using theoretical concepts from the field of boundary work, this paper examines how The Guardian, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter editorialized Facebook’s role in these three incidents to discursively construct the boundary between the value of professional journalism to democracy and Facebook’s ascendant role in facilitating essential democratic functions. Findings reveal that these publications attempted to define Facebook as a news organization (i.e., include it within the boundaries of journalism) so that they could then criticize the company for not following duties traditionally incumbent upon news organizations (i.e., place it outside the boundaries of journalism). This paper advances scholarship that focuses on both inward and outward conceptions of boundary work, further explores the complex challenge of defining who a journalist is in the face of rapidly changing technological norms, and advances scholarship in the field of media ethics that positions ethical analysis at the institutional level.     

Rapid mask prototyping for microfluidics

With the rise of microfluidics for the past decade, there has come an ever more pressing need for a low-cost and rapid prototyping technology, especially for research and education purposes. In this article, we report a rapid prototyping process of chromed masks for various microfluidic applications. The process takes place out of a clean room, uses a commercially available video-projector, and can be completed in less than half an hour. We quantify the ranges of fields of view and of resolutions accessible through this video-projection system and report the fabrication of critical microfluidic components (junctions, straight channels, and curved channels). To exemplify the process, three common devices are produced using this method: a droplet generation device, a gradient generation device, and a neuro-engineering oriented device. The neuro-engineering oriented device is a compartmentalized microfluidic chip, and therefore, required the production and the precise alignment of two different masks.     

Analysis of single comments left for bioRxiv preprints till September 2019

IntroductionWhile early commenting on studies is seen as one of the advantages of preprints, the type of such comments, and the people who post them, have not been systematically explored.Materials and methodsWe analysed comments posted between 21 May 2015 and 9 September 2019 for 1983 bioRxiv preprints that received only one comment on the bioRxiv website. The comment types were classified by three coders independently, with all differences resolved by consensus.ResultsOur analysis showed that 69% of comments were posted by non-authors (N = 1366), and 31% by the preprints’ authors themselves (N = 617). Twelve percent of non-author comments (N = 168) were full review reports traditionally found during journal review, while the rest most commonly contained praises (N = 577, 42%), suggestions (N = 399, 29%), or criticisms (N = 226, 17%). Authors’ comments most commonly contained publication status updates (N = 354, 57%), additional study information (N = 158, 26%), or solicited feedback for the preprints (N = 65, 11%).ConclusionsOur results indicate that comments posted for bioRxiv preprints may have potential benefits for both the public and the scholarly community. Further research is needed to measure the direct impact of these comments on comments made by journal peer reviewers, subsequent preprint versions or journal publications.