In this paper, we study the linking patterns and discussion topics of political bloggers. Our aim is to measure the degree of interaction between liberal and conservative blogs, and to uncover any differences in the structure of the two communities. Specifically, we analyze the posts of 40 "A-list" blogs over the period of two months preceding the U.S. Presidential Election of 2004, to study how often they referred to one another and to quantify the overlap in the topics they discussed, both within the liberal and conservative communities, and also across communities. We also study a single day snapshot of over 1,000 political blogs. This snapshot captures blogrolls (the list of links to other blogs frequently found in sidebars), and presents a more static picture of a broader blogosphere. Most significantly, we find differences in the behavior of liberal and conservative blogs, with conservative blogs linking to each other more frequently and in a denser pattern.

/pdf/the-political-blogosphere-and-the-2004-u-s-election-divided-4t2xyr2bbp.pdf

The political blogosphere and the 2004 U.S. election: divided they blog

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

The course is focused on historical texts, most of them philosophical. Context for understanding the texts and the course of democratic development will be provided in lecture and discussions, and by some background readings (Dunn). We begin with the remarkable Athenian democracy, and its frequent enemy the Spartan oligarchy. In Athens legislation was passed directly by an assembly of all citizens, and executive officials were selected by lot rather than by competitive election. Athenian oligarchs such as Plato more admired Sparta, and their disdain for the democracy became the judgment of the ages, until well after the modern democratic revolutions. Marsilius of Padua in the early Middle Ages argued for popular sovereignty. The Italian citystates of the Middle Ages did without kings, and looked back to Rome and Greece for republican models. During the English Civil War republicans debated whether the few or the many should be full citizens of the regime. The English, French, and American revolutions struggled with justifying and establishing a representative democracy suitable for a large state, and relied on election rather than lot to select officials. The English established a constitutional monarchy, admired in Europe, and adapted by the Americans in their republican constitution. The American Revolution helped inspire the French, and the French inspired republican and democratic revolution throughout Europe during the 19 century.

/pdf/democracy-and-its-critics-2zxg086s7q.pdf

Democracy and Its Critics

Many ``real-world'' networks are clearly defined while most ``social'' networks are to some extent subjective. Indeed, the accuracy of empirically-determined social networks is a question of some concern because individuals may have distinct perceptions of what constitutes a social link. One unambiguous type of connection is sexual contact. Here we analyze data on the sexual behavior of a random sample of individuals, and find that the cumulative distributions of the number of sexual partners during the twelve months prior to the survey decays as a power law with similar exponents $\alpha \approx 2.4$ for females and males. The scale-free nature of the web of human sexual contacts suggests that strategic interventions aimed at preventing the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases may be the most efficient approach.

The Web of Human Sexual Contacts

The increasing availability of digitized text presents enormous opportunities for social scientists. Yet hand coding many blogs, speeches, government records, newspapers, or other sources of unstructured text is infeasible. Although computer scientists have methods for automated content analysis, most are optimized to classify individual documents, whereas social scientists instead want generalizations about the population of documents, such as the proportion in a given category. Unfortunately, even a method with a high percent of individual documents correctly classified can be hugely biased when estimating category proportions. By directly optimizing for this social science goal, we develop a method that gives approximately unbiased estimates of category proportions even when the optimal classifier performs poorly. We illustrate with diverse data sets, including the daily expressed opinions of thousands of people about the U.S. presidency. We also make available software that implements our methods and large corpora of text for further analysis.

/pdf/a-method-of-automated-nonparametric-content-analysis-for-n9f2uk7fhu.pdf

A Method of Automated Nonparametric Content Analysis for Social Science

Claims about the Web and politics have commonly confounded two dierent things: retrievability and visibility, the large universe of pages that could theoretically be accessed versus those that citizens are most likely to encounter. While the governing assumption of much previous work has been that retrievability would translate inexorably into visibility, we cast doubt on that claim. Drawing on a large literature in computer science that ties a site’s visibility to the number of inbound hyperlinks it receives, this paper proposes a new methodology for measuring the link structure surrounding political Web sites. Our technique involves iterative, extremely largescale crawls away from political sites easily accessible through popular online search tools, and it uses sophisticated automated methods to categorize site content. In every community we examine, we

/pdf/googlearchy-how-a-few-heavily-linked-sites-dominate-politics-576rlnjbdc.pdf

\Googlearchy": How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web

The rapid growth of the World Wide Web has created many challenges for both general purpose crawling, search engines and web directories, making it difficult to find, index, and classify web pages based on a topic. Topic driven crawlers can complement search engines because they pre-classify the pages retrieved by the crawl. To implement such a focused crawler, a strategy for ordering the crawl frontier is required. Such a strategy can only use information gleaned from previously crawled pages to estimate the relevance of a newly observed URL. Because the best strategy for ranking URLsin the crawl frontier is not immediately apparent, we discover strategies by evolving them using a genetic algorithm. Strategies are learned by evaluating the results of crawls simulated using a database generated by a previous, more general crawl. We conclude that a rank function that combines analysis of text and link structure yields effective strategies. The evolved strategies perform better than the commonly used Best First strategy.

/pdf/evolving-strategies-for-focused-web-crawling-51y1sglxjl.pdf

Evolving strategies for focused web crawling

A large amount of research, technical and professional documents are available today in digital formats. Digital libraries are created to facilitate search and retrieval of information supplied by the documents. These libraries may span an entire area of interest (e.g., computer science) or be limited to documents within a small organization. While tools that index, classify, rank and retrieve documents from such libraries are important, it would be worthwhile to complement these tools with information available on the Web. We propose one such technique that uses a topical crawler driven by the information extracted from a research document. The goal of the crawler is to harvest a collection of Web pages that are focused on the topical subspaces associated with the given document. The collection created through Web crawling is further processed using lexical and linkage analysis. The entire process is automated and uses machine learning techniques to both guide the crawler as well as analyze the collection it fetches. A report is generated at the end that provides visual cues and information to the researcher.

/pdf/panorama-extending-digital-libraries-with-topical-crawlers-2vcd6412yg.pdf

Panorama: extending digital libraries with topical crawlers

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\Googlearchy": How a Few Heavily-Linked Sites Dominate Politics on the Web

Evolving strategies for focused web crawling

Panorama: extending digital libraries with topical crawlers