List of Publications

This dissertation consists of multiple research publications that have been peer-reviewed and presented to an international academic audience through journals and

12 Chapter 1. Introduction

Demonstrative Case Studies Social Media & Society

Geospatial Set Visualization SIGGIS at ICIS Conference Social Set Visualizer v2 IEEE EDOC Conference Social Set Visualizer v1 IEEE Big Data Conference

Social Interaction Model IEEE Big Data Conference Social Set Visualizer v3 IEEE Big Data Conference Social Set Visualizer v2 SetVR at Diagrams Conference Social Set Visualizer v1 IEEE EDOC Conference

Big Social Data Analytics Proceedings of IEEE

2016

2017

2018

2019

2015

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5 4 3

Figure 1.7: Overview of relevant peer-reviewed publications on the Social Set Visualizer with highlight on five publications chosen for this thesis

conferences. The presented work stems from more than three years of systematic, it-erative research which focused on the theories and applications of Social Set Analysis in Big Social Data Analytics. Throughout my PhD studies, I have co-authored a total of 13 peer-reviewed publications in the field of Big Social Data Analytics. Out of these publications, seven are first-authored.

Five of these 13 publications have been chosen to be included in this thesis and to be given a special focus due to their relevance to the Social Set Visualizer.

Each of these five chosen publications contributes to at least one aspect of the Social Set Visualizer, either towards the design, development or evaluation. This includes a single-authored publication which extends and refines the conceptual model of social data based on various learnings from the research presented in this thesis.

The five peer-reviewed focus publications that have been selected for this thesis are highlighted in the publication overview with regard to the 10 publications on the Social Set Visualizer (seeFigure 1.7). They are accompanied by further publications relevant to the development of the Social Set Visualizer, which are not explicitly included in this thesis. Three further student papers are also not illustrated in this figure. In the following, a short overview on each of the five included publications will be given.

1.4. List of Publications 13

Publication 1: Journal article introducing Social Set Analysis approach

Ravi Vatrapu, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Abid Hussain andBenjamin Flesch. Social Set Analysis: A Set Theoretical Approach to Big Data Analytics. IEEE Access: Spe-cial Section on Theoretical Foundations for Big Data Applications: Challenges and Opportunities, vol. 4, pages 2542–2571, 2016

This journal article introduces the novel Social Set Analysis approach to a larger academic audience. It develops the theoretical foundation of a set-based approach to Big Data Analytics. Furthermore, it outlines future work with regard to the implemen-tation of software tools that incorporate the Social Set Analysis approach in order to improve the generation of insights from Big Social Data. It was published in a spe-cial edition of IEEE Access, which is dedicated to the advancement of the theoretical foundations of Big Data, with particular focus on challenges and opportunities.

Publication 2: Presentation of the Social Set Visualizer

Benjamin Flesch, Abid Hussain and Ravi Vatrapu. Social Set Visualizer: Demon-stration of Methodology and Software. In 2015 IEEE 19th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Workshop, pages 148–151, Sept 2015

This conference paper presents the first version of the Social Set Visualizer soft-ware tool at IEEE EDOC. It showcases the set-based approach to Big Social Data Analytics, and presents the web-based Visual Analytics dashboard. Furthermore, it generates insights on social media reactions to international clothing retailers in the wake of the 2013 Bangladesh factory disasters, utilizing a Facebook dataset of 180M data points.

Publication 3: Social Set Visualizer with UpSet-style Visualizations

Benjamin Flesch, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Abid Hussain and Ravi Vatrapu. Social Set Visualizer (SoSeVi) II: Interactive Social Set Analysis of Big Data. In SetVR@

Diagrams, pages 19–28, 2016

This conference paper presents the second version of the Social Set Visualizer at the Set Visualization and Reasoning (SetVR) workshop colocated with Diagrams conference in Philadelphia, PA. In this paper, the Social Set Visualizer software tool presents novel, scalable visualizations of large-scale sets and set intersections in-spired by the UpSet approach [Lexet al.2014] and applies this approach to Social Set Analysis of Big Social Data. Furthermore, it showcases a set-based visualization of migration patterns in social media. The audience of this highly specialized workshop consisted of set visualization experts, who were very curious about the utilization of cutting-edge set-based visualization techniques and their application to the problem of Big Social Data Analytics.

14 Chapter 1. Introduction

Publication 4: Final Iteration on the Social Set Visualizer

Benjamin Flesch, Ravi Vatrapu and Raghava Rao Mukkamala. A Big Social Media Data Study of the 2017 German Federal Election Based on Social Set Analysis of Political Party Facebook Pages with SoSeVi. In Big Data (Big Data), 2017 IEEE International Conference on, pages 2720–2729. IEEE, 2017

This conference paper presents the third version of the Social Set Visualizer, which includes a built-in data collection process, and thereby represents a complete implementation of the entire Big Data Value Chain. It contains a comprehensive case study on the 2017 German parliamentary election. Deep insights are generated through use of the Social Set Visualizer software tool on a large-scale Facebook dataset with more than 15M data points. Furthermore, it includes a custom query language which can be interactively used in order to create visualizations of large-scale set intersections from Big Social Data.

Publication 5: Unified Social Interaction Model for Big Social Data

Benjamin Flesch. Social Interaction Model. In Big Data (Big Data), 2018 IEEE International Conference on. IEEE, 2018

This single-authored conference paper presents the Social Interaction Model, a unified model of Big Social Data, which extends and supplements the existing model of social data [Mukkamalaet al.2013] that was previously developed by our research group. Based on the experiences gathered by utilizing the Social Set Analysis ap-proach to Big Social Data Analytics over the course of my PhD project, it proposes a framework based onActions andReactions in social media. From theseInteractions, various types of textual and non-textual Artifacts are created. Thereby, it radically simplifies the existing models and is in line with analytical approaches that utilize di-mensions of time and space for a set-based analysis, such as the Social Set Analysis approach.

Further Publications

Furthermore, eight peer-reviewed publications have not been included in this thesis.

Even though these eight excluded publications provide further case studies of the Social Set Visualizer, the five chosen focus publications provide a good picture on the contributions of this PhD project.

• Benjamin Flesch, Ravi Vatrapu, Raghava Rao Mukkamala and Abid Hussain.

Social Set Visualizer: A Set Theoretical Approach to Big Social Data Analytics of Real-world Events. In Big Data (Big Data), 2015 IEEE International Confer-ence on, pages 2418–2427. IEEE, 2015

• Ravi Vatrapu, Abid Hussain, Niels Buus Lassen, Raghava Rao Mukkamala, Ben-jamin Fleschand Rene Madsen.Social Set Analysis: Four Demonstrative Case Studies. In Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Social Media

& Society, page 3. ACM, 2015