Sentiment contagion occurs when attitudes toward one topic are influenced by attitudes toward others. Detecting and understanding this phenomenon is essential for analyzing topic evolution and informing social policies. Prior research has developed models to simulate the contagion process through hypothesis testing and has visualized user-topic correlations to aid comprehension. Nevertheless, the vast volume of topics and the complex interrelationships on social media present two key challenges: (1) efficient construction of large-scale sentiment contagion networks, and (2) in-depth explorations of these networks. To address these challenges, we introduce a causality-based framework that efficiently constructs and explains sentiment contagion. We further propose a map-like visualization technique that encodes time using a horizontal axis, enabling efficient visualization of causality-based sentiment flow while maintaining scalability through limitless spatial segmentation. Based on the visualization, we develop CausalMap, a system that supports analysts in tracing sentiment contagion pathways and assessing the influence of different demographic groups. Furthermore, we conduct comprehensive evaluations-including two use cases, a task-based user study, an expert interview, and an algorithm evaluation-to validate the usability and effectiveness of our approach.

Mental health is an urgent societal issue, and social scientists are increasingly turning to online mental health communities (OMHCs) to analyze user behavior data for early intervention. However, existing sequence mining techniques fall short of the urgent need to explore the behavior progression of different groups (e.g., recovery or deterioration groups) and track the potential long-term impact of behaviors on mental health status. To address this issue, we introduce EMINDS, a visual analytics system built on a novel automatic mining pipeline that extracts distinct behavior stages and assesses the potential impact of frequent stage patterns on mental health status over time. The system includes a set of interactive visualizations that summarize the meaning of each behavior stage and the evolution of different stage patterns. We feature a pattern-centric Sankey diagram to reveal contextual information about the impact of stage patterns on mental health, helping experts understand the specific changes in sequences before and after a stage pattern. We evaluated the effectiveness and usability of EMINDS through two case studies and expert interviews, which examined the potential stage patterns impacting long-term mental health by analyzing user behaviors on Reddit.

Propagation analysis refers to studying how information spreads on social media, a pivotal endeavor for understanding social sentiment and public opinions. Numerous studies contribute to visualizing information spread, but few have considered the implicit and complex diffusion patterns among multiple platforms. To bridge the gap, we summarize cross-platform diffusion patterns with experts and identify significant factors that dissect the mechanisms of cross-platform information spread. Based on that, we propose an information diffusion model that estimates the likelihood of a topic/post spreading among different social media platforms. Moreover, we propose a novel visual metaphor that encapsulates cross-platform propagation in a manner analogous to the spread of seeds across gardens. Specifically, we visualize platforms, posts, implicit cross-platform routes, and salient instances as elements of a virtual ecosystem - gardens, flowers, winds, and seeds, respectively. We further develop a visual analytic system, namely BloomWind, that enables users to quickly identify the cross-platform diffusion patterns and investigate the relevant social media posts. Ultimately, we demonstrate the usage of BloomWind through two case studies and validate its effectiveness using expert interviews.

How to achieve academic career success has been a long-standing research question in social science research. With the growing availability of large-scale well-documented academic profiles and career trajectories, scholarly interest in career success has been reinvigorated, which has emerged to be an active research domain called the Science of Science (i.e., SciSci). In this study, we adopt an innovative dynamic perspective to examine how individual and social factors will influence career success over time. We propose ACSeeker, an interactive visual analytics approach to explore the potential factors of success and how the influence of multiple factors changes at different stages of academic careers. We first applied a Multi-factor Impact Analysis framework to estimate the effect of different factors on academic career success over time. We then developed a visual analytics system to understand the dynamic effects interactively. A novel timeline is designed to reveal and compare the factor impacts based on the whole population. A customized career line showing the individual career development is provided to allow a detailed inspection. To validate the effectiveness and usability of ACSeeker, we report two case studies and interviews with a social scientist and general researchers.

The rapid development of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) has led operators to record huge amounts of fine-grained data from the in-game activities of players. These data provide considerable opportunities with which to study the dynamic interplay among player behaviors and investigate the roles of various social structures that underlie such interplay. However, modeling and visualizing these behavioral data remain a challenge. In this study, we propose a novel influence-susceptible model to measure the dynamic interplay among multiple behaviors. Based on this model, we introduce a new visual analytics system called BeXplorer. BeXplorer enables analysts to interactively explore the dynamic interplay between player purchase and communication behaviors and to examine the manner in which this interplay is bound by social structures where players are embedded.

Recently, social media has become a potentially new way for scholarly journals to disseminate and evaluate research outputs. Scholarly journals have started promoting their research articles to a wide range of audiences via social media platforms. This article aims to investigate the social media presence of scholarly journals across disciplines. We extracted journals from Web of Science and searched for the social media presence of these journals on Facebook and Twitter. Relevant metrics and content relating to the journals' social media accounts were also crawled for data analysis. From our results, the social media presence of scholarly journals lies between 7.1% and 14.2% across disciplines; and it has shown a steady increase in the last decade. The popularity of scholarly journals on social media is distinct across disciplines. Further, we investigated whether social media metrics of journals can predict the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). We found that the number of followers and disciplines have significant effects on the JIF. In addition, a word co‐occurrence network analysis was also conducted to identify popular topics discussed by scholarly journals on social media platforms. Finally, we highlight challenges and issues faced in this study and discuss future research directions.

With the rapid development of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), a huge amount of fine-grained data on the in-game activities of players have been recorded by MMORPGs operators. These data provide considerable opportunities with which to study the dynamic interplay between player behaviors and investigate the roles of various social structures that underlie such interplay. However, it is challenging to model and visualize these behavioral data. This study proposes a novel influence-susceptible model to measure the dynamic interplay between behaviors. Based on this model, we introduce a new visual analytics system called BeXplorer. This system enables analysts to interactively explore the dynamic interplay between player purchase and communication behaviors and to examine the manner in which this interplay is bound by social structures where players are embedded. Three case studies and a task-based evaluation are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of our method.

Rapid advancement of social media tremendously facilitates and accelerates the information diffusion among users around the world. How and to what extent will the information on social media achieve widespread diffusion across the world? How can we quantify the interaction between users from different geolocations in the diffusion process? How will the spatial patterns of information diffusion change over time? To address these questions, a dynamic social gravity model (SGM) is proposed to quantify the dynamic spatial interaction behavior among social media users in information diffusion. The dynamic SGM includes three factors that are theoretically significant to the spatial diffusion of information: geographic distance, cultural proximity, and linguistic similarity. Temporal dimension is also taken into account to help detect recency effect, and ground-truth data is integrated into the model to help measure the diffusion power. Furthermore, SocialWave, a visual analytic system, is developed to support both spatial and temporal investigative tasks. SocialWave provides a temporal visualization that allows users to quickly identify the overall temporal diffusion patterns, which reflect the spatial characteristics of the diffusion network. When a meaningful temporal pattern is identified, SocialWave utilizes a new occlusion-free spatial visualization, which integrates a node-link diagram into a circular cartogram for further analysis. Moreover, we propose a set of rich user interactions that enable in-depth, multi-faceted analysis of the diffusion on social media. The effectiveness and efficiency of the mathematical model and visualization system are evaluated with two datasets on social media, namely, Ebola Epidemics and Ferguson Unrest.

Cooperation and competition (jointly called "coopetition") are two modes of interactions among a set of concurrent topics on social media. How do topics cooperate or compete with each other to gain public attention? Which topics tend to cooperate or compete with one another? Who plays the key role in coopetition-related interactions? We answer these intricate questions by proposing a visual analytics system that facilitates the in-depth analysis of topic coopetition on social media. We model the complex interactions among topics as a combination of carry-over, coopetition recruitment, and coopetition distraction effects. This model provides a close functional approximation of the coopetition process by depicting how different groups of influential users (i.e., "topic leaders") affect coopetition. We also design EvoRiver, a time-based visualization, that allows users to explore coopetition-related interactions and to detect dynamically evolving patterns, as well as their major causes. We test our model and demonstrate the usefulness of our system based on two Twitter data sets (social topics data and business topics data).

How do various topics compete for public attention when they are spreading on social media? What roles do opinion leaders play in the rise and fall of competitiveness of various topics? In this study, we propose an expanded topic competition model to characterize the competition for public attention on multiple topics promoted by various opinion leaders on social media. To allow an intuitive understanding of the estimated measures, we present a timeline visualization through a metaphoric interpretation of the results. The visual design features both topical and social aspects of the information diffusion process by compositing ThemeRiver with storyline style visualization. ThemeRiver shows the increase and decrease of competitiveness of each topic. Opinion leaders are drawn as threads that converge or diverge with regard to their roles in influencing the public agenda change over time. To validate the effectiveness of the visual analysis techniques, we report the insights gained on two collections of Tweets: the 2012 United States presidential election and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

This study explores the factors influencing citations to Internet studies by assessing the relative explanatory power of three perspectives: normative theory, the social constructivist approach, and a natural growth mechanism. Using data on 7,700+ articles of Internet studies published in 100+ Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI)‐listed journals in 2000–2009, the study adopted a multilevel model to disentangle the impact between article‐ and journal‐level factors on citations. This research strategy resulted in a number of both expected and surprising findings. The primary determinants for citations are found to be journal‐level factors, accounting for 14% of the variances in citations of Internet studies. The impact of some, if not all, article‐level factors on citations are moderated by journal‐level factors. Internet studies, like studies in other areas (e.g., management, demography, and ecology), are cited more for rhetorical purposes, as suggested by the social constructivist approach, rather than as a form of reward, as argued by normative theory. The impact of time on citations varies across journals, which creates a growing “citation gap” for Internet studies published in journals with different characteristics.