Online social networks.

Using the narrative imagery of Instagram and the cultural narrative of the
Olympics, I explore the role of agency and autonomy in modern sport with a focus on the
commercial and institutional arms of surfing. This project is an attempt to evaluate visual
and cultural narrative from the perspective of a literary scholar and to root theory and
philosophy in issues that go beyond scholarship and academics. In chapter one, I use
sports sociologists Jennifer Hargreaves and Krista Comer as well as Jean Kilbourne and
Rosalind Gill to illuminate and explore two surf-centric Instagram accounts, both of
which imagine a story of surfing through a mostly visual medium. In chapter two, I turn
to Elizabeth Grosz and Michel Foucault to help explore the institutionalized arm of
surfing through its recent inclusion in the Olympic Games.

Sentiment Analysis has been researched in a variety of contexts but in this thesis, the focus is on sentiment analysis in Twitter, which poses its own unique challenges such as the use of slang, abbreviations, emoticons, hashtags, and user mentions. The 140-character restriction on the length of tweets can also lead to text that is difficult even for a human to determine its sentiment. Specifically, this study will analyze sentiment analysis of bilingual (U.S. English and Spanish language) Tweets. The hypothesis here is that Bilingual sentiment analysis is more accurate than sentiment analysis in a single language (English or Spanish) when analyzing bilingual tweets. In general, currently sentiment analysis in bilingual tweets is done against an English dictionary. For each of the test cases in this thesis’ experiment we will use the Python NLTK sentiment package.

My intention for this show is to explore the effect of alienation that ironically is being
produced by social media. The principal concept is developed around shame, sharing, and
notoriety on three different social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, and
Telegram. This show explores the social media perception of myself in the realms of
human interaction, identity, and memory in social media through the critical
appropriation of the languages of design and photography. The installation with four
Facebook profile pictures in large scale and framed looks at the way a personal image can
convey the impression of widely different personalities. The selections of personal
exchanges over Facebook and Instagram show the degree to which social media creates
its own visual language and mode of communication, which sometimes becomes
separated from reality and intention. The show extends its reach to performance and
direct interaction with the viewer through the availability of stickers for comments by the profile pictures and a third area, where viewers can write or draw their own messages
through the simple medium of chalk, which can then be rendered in virtual form through
posts on a specially created webpage. The viewer should thus be challenged to ask, to
what degrees do words and images communicate the essence of our selves and our own
will.

How we share our good news with people can have a significant effect on our
lives. Sharing good news on social media sites involves a process called capitalization.
Capitalization has been shown to increase well-being when others provide appropriate
responses in face-to-face interactions. To see if this effect on well-being extends to our
online presence, this study utilized the social media site Facebook to observe if
capitalization predicted well-being and relationship satisfaction. This study used data
collected from 137 participants recruited from an undergraduate participant pool and
from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Consistent with hypotheses, participants who reported
receiving active and constructive responses after sharing a positive event on Facebook
also reported greater personal well-being and relationship satisfaction. Although future
experimental research is needed to establish causality, the current results suggest that the ways in which friends respond to social media posts are associated with personal and
relationship well-being.