Automatically detecting the stance of people toward political and ideological topics –namely their “Ideological Perspective”– from social media is a rapidly growing research area with a wide range of applications. Research in such a field faces several challenges among which is the lack of annotated corpora and associated guidelines for collecting annotations. The problem is even more pronounce...

The beliefs people hold about the social and physical world are central to self-definition and social interaction. The current research analyzes reasoning about three kinds of beliefs: those that concern matters of fact (e.g., dinosaurs are extinct), preference (e.g., green is the prettiest color), and ideology (e.g., there is only one God). The domain of ideology is of unique interest because ...

This article examined, thought a Cultural Historical Activity Theory lens, how immersiveor pervasive environments and pedagogical agents could more easily support social collaboration as foundation of contemporary learning theory. It is argued that the fundamentalism-liberationism contradiction (learn from versus learn with technology) is no longer justifiable as contemporary technology tools (...

This paper draws on the concept of ideological dilemmas in order to explore how a sample of young people constructed potentially contrary themes of liberal citizenship in discussions of un/employment. The study took place in the context of recent policy developments in the UK which have sought to place a renewed emphasis upon notions of responsible citizenship in relation to both welfare and ed...

In table 2 we present standard errors for our main estimates. For estimates that come from MRI, the GSS or the CNES, we compute standard errors through a nonparametric bootstrap over samples of respondents. For estimates that come from comScore aggregate data, that is not an option. Instead we perform a parametric bootstrap in which we model the share conservative of each website as an independ...

T he development and elaboration of the spatial theory of voting has contributed greatly to the study of legislative decision making and elections. Statistical models that estimate the spatial locations of individual decision-makers have made a key contribution to this success. Spatial models have been estimated for the U.S. Congress, the Supreme Court, U.S. presidents, a large number of non-U....

The analysis in the paper suggests that (i) if news sites were less vertically differentiated, segregation would increase considerably, and (ii) if users did not visit multiple sites, more users would have extremely high or low conservative exposure. To make these hypotheses more precise, we specify and estimate a simple model of Internet news demand, and use it to simulate segregation and cons...

Online discussion forums are a popular platform for people to voice their opinions on any subject matter and to discuss or debate any issue of interest. In forums where users discuss social, political, or religious issues, there are often heated debates among users or participants. Existing research has studied mining of user stances or camps on certain issues, opposing perspectives, and conten...

The gay rights movement is one of the major social changes of the last twenty years, drawing comparisons to the movements for women and African Americans in the 1960’s. Changes in laws enacted by the legislature and the judiciary followed a massive shift in public opinion on gay issues, most notably marriage. This paper utilizes an experimental method to determine which of three arguments, focu...

The uses of Internet technology within educational settings reflect particular perspectives on a host of issues including ability, race, and learning styles, but are often not examined for their implicit ideological or epistemological foundations. Web accessibility (ensuring that web content is accessible to persons with disabilities), though laden with progressive intent, is increasingly conne...