Annotation – Technology Firms Shape Political Communication: The Work of Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter, and Google With Campaigns During the 2016 U.S. Presidential Cycle May 9, 2018 - If you ran digital strategy for a presidential campaign, and Facebook came knocking on your door and said "We want to help you win this election," would you turn them down? There's nothing like a little help from the mothership.
Annotation – Mining Social Media: Key Players, Sentiments, and Communities April 30, 2018 - This is an academic research project and for the most part I'm focusing on academic resources. But I'm working to understand the specific tools and methods for mining social media data in order to effectively intervene using communications campaigns. The annotation offered here adds to these concepts by introducing "community mining" and techniques for analyzing key players, roles, and strong subgroup connections of communication and influence within a larger social media network. These are key concepts for understanding how opinions within a network are formed, shared, and spread. Or as someone might have once said, it's about influencing a group by influencing the influencers.
Annotation: A Survey on Sentiment Analysis and Opinion Mining Techniques April 27, 2018 - The phrase "sentiment analysis" is high on the list of search terms for anyone seeking to understand how to process social media data. It's a component of Natural Language Processing (NLP), where a machine extracts (somewhat) accurate meaning from human language and textual information. This seems really hard, unless I'm wrong, because the whole AI field and NLP seem to be moving forward fast once again. Here's an annotation of a journal article that provides a decent overview.
Annotation: Mining the Social Web April 11, 2018 - While mining the Information Science Virtual Library for academic papers on "social media" and "data mining," I came across Matthew Russell's O'Reilly book Mining the Social Web: Data Mining Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, Google+, Github, and More. The 2nd edition was published in October 2013, with a 3rd edition scheduled for publication next month. Because the book covers the specific techniques I'm after concerning data mining and analysis of social media, I decided to pull the trigger and buy the book right now.
The book is basically a tutorial on data mining social media sites using Python. Alas all the source code it references is in Python 2.7 and I've been working with version 3.6, but that's fine. It also covers using IPython Notebooks and even begins with a guide to setting things up on a virtual server. I'll probably wait to actually do that until I see what's new in the 3rd edition. But the book definitely makes the final cut for my annotated bibliography. With that as a given, I thought it would be useful to get started with the first annotation. 
Annotation – Channel 4 News Report – Cambridge Analytica: Whistleblower reveals data grab of 50 million Facebook profiles May 9, 2018 - So far in this project I've been annotating traditional academic sources. These sources explore methods of machine learning, Natural Language Processing, sentiment analysis, and the tools used to mine social media for research purposes. But the literature hasn't kept pace with the news, and social media data is being used for things other than academic research. Like maybe stealing elections. Here begins a series of three annotations of investigative reports by London's Channel 4 News. These are video stories about Cambridge Analytica and its methods and role in political campaigns in the U.S., Africa, Europe and beyond. These are of course non-traditional annotations. But I consider the source credible, and given the subject important to include. 
Adventures in Information Science 