This book presents ample, richly illustrated account on results and experience from a project, dealing with the analysis of data concerning behavior patterns on the Web. The advertising on the Web is dealt with, and the ultimate issue is to assess the share of the artificial, automated activity (ads fraud), as opposed to the genuine human activity. After a comprehensive introductory part, a full-fledged report is provided from a wide range of analytic and design efforts, oriented at: the representation of the Web behavior patterns, formation and selection of telling variables, structuring of the populations of behavior patterns, including the use of clustering, classification of these patterns, and devising most effective and efficient techniques to separate the artificial from the genuine traffic. A series of important and useful conclusions is drawn, concerning both the nature of the observed phenomenon, and hence the characteristics of the respective datasets, and the appropriateness of the methodological approaches tried out and devised. Some of these observations and conclusions, both related to data and to methods employed, provide a new insight and are sometimes surprising. The book provides also a rich bibliography on the main problem approached and on the various methodologies tried out.

Analyzing the Social Web provides a framework for the analysis of public data currently available and being generated by social networks and social media, like Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare. Access and analysis of this public data about people and their connections to one another allows for new applications of traditional social network analysis techniques that let us identify things like who are the most important or influential people in a network, how things will spread through the network, and the nature of peoples' relationships. Analyzing the Social Web introduces you to these techniques, shows you their application to many different types of social media, and discusses how social media can be used as a tool for interacting with the online public. - Presents interactive social applications on the web, and the types of analysis that are currently conducted in the study of social media - Covers the basics of network structures for beginners, including measuring methods for describing nodes, edges, and parts of the network - Discusses the major categories of social media applications or phenomena and shows how the techniques presented can be applied to analyze and understand the underlying data - Provides an introduction to information visualization, particularly network visualization techniques, and methods for using them to identify interesting features in a network, generate hypotheses for analysis, and recognize patterns of behavior - Includes a supporting website with lecture slides, exercises, and downloadable social network data sets that can be used can be used to apply the techniques presented in the book

The pervasiveness of the Internet has had a significant impact on global politics, economics, and culture. To create a truly effective product in such a saturated digital environment, developers must study what has come before and how they can utilize existing tools to even greater effect. Evaluating Websites and Web Services: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on User Satisfaction explores some of the various approaches to the study and assessment of Internet technologies, providing scholars, researchers, developers, and professionals with critical knowledge and an interdisciplinary perspective on e-services in a variety of functional areas, from government and commerce to social media and education.

Andrew Burn and David Parker outline how multi-modality theory can be used to analyze texts whicj employ multiple semiotic modes and media, in such a way that a balanced consideration is given to the characteristics of each mode, how they integrate, and how they distribute textual functions between them. The medthods are rooted in a view of significance as dependent on social context, and fulfilling the social and communicative interests of both producers of textual production and use contingent upon digital formats will also be a determining content of the analytical method.

As governments, citizens and organizations have moved online there is an increasing need for academic enquiry to adapt to this new context for communication and political action. This adaptation is crucially dependent on researchers being equipped with the necessary methodological tools to extract, analyze and visualize patterns of web activity. This volume profiles the latest techniques being employed by social scientists to collect and interpret data from some of the most popular social media applications, the political parties' own online activist spaces, and the wider system of hyperlinks that structure the inter-connections between these sites. Including contributions from a range of academic disciplines including Political Science, Media and Communication Studies, Economics, and Computer Science, this study showcases a new methodological approach that has been expressly designed to capture and analyze web data in the process of investigating substantive questions.

Analysing Variation in English brings together a range of perspectives on the collection, analysis and broader relevance of variable language data. In the first half of the book, the focus is firmly on the description and comparison of methods for collecting and analysing examples of variation in language. Novel quantitative and computational methods are introduced and exemplified alongside more traditional approaches. The innovative second half of the book establishes and tests the relevance of language variation to other aspects of linguistics such as language change, and to other disciplines such as law and education. Each chapter concludes with a 'Where next?' section, providing guidance on further reading, but also pointers to under-researched areas, designed to help identify good topics for projects and dissertations. Designed to be used by students as well as researchers, the book will be welcomed by those working in English language and linguistics, sociolinguistics or language change.

Internet research spans many disciplines. From the computer or information s- ences, through engineering, and to social sciences, humanities and the arts, almost all of our disciplines have made contributions to internet research, whether in the effort to understand the effect of the internet on their area of study, or to investigate the social and political changes related to the internet, or to design and develop so- ware and hardware for the network. The possibility and extent of contributions of internet research vary across disciplines, as do the purposes, methods, and outcomes. Even the epistemological underpinnings differ widely. The internet, then, does not have a discipline of study for itself: It is a ?eld for research (Baym, 2005), an open environment that simultaneously supports many approaches and techniques not otherwise commensurable with each other. There are, of course, some inhibitions that limit explorations in this ?eld: research ethics, disciplinary conventions, local and national norms, customs, laws, borders, and so on. Yet these limits on the int- net as a ?eld for research have not prevented the rapid expansion and exploration of the internet. After nearly two decades of research and scholarship, the limits are a positive contribution, providing bases for discussion and interrogation of the contexts of our research, making internet research better for all. These ‘limits,’ challenges that constrain the theoretically limitless space for internet research, create boundaries that give de?nition to the ?eld and provide us with a particular topography that enables research and investigation.