tApp: A Tumblr Analytics Dashboard

Modelling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, 2021

Tumblr is a popular microblogging platform that allows users to share content and interact with other users. This paper focuses on the measurement and modeling of Tumblr network traffic characteristics, since few studies have focused on Tumblr from this perspective. Our work uses a combination of active and passive approaches to network traffic measurement. Using Wireshark and mitmproxy, we identify the primary hosts associated with Tumblr traffic, the traffic patterns associated with specific user actions, and the TCP connection behaviour. We then study Tumblr usage by our campus community for one week, using passively collected connection summaries. As a frame of reference, we also compare this traffic with several other popular social media platforms with user-generated content, namely Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Our work identifies several similarities and differences in the network traffic patterns for these social networking sites. We also develop and calibrate a synthetic workload model for Tumblr network traffic.

Discourse, Context and Media, 2018

Tumblr is one of the most popular content sharing websites, where the use of keyword tags that enhance the searchability and visibility of posts is prominent. However, this resource has been creatively exploited by some users beyond its folksonomic use: Since Tumblr does not have a separate comment section for posts, the tag section may also be used for tags with discourse functions such as expressing an opinion, a reaction, or including asides. This article explores the practice of including comments in tags, taking into account the specific technological features of Tumblr's tagging system, as well as the role of the communities within the website. The corpus analyzed in the study comprises two datasets collected from the general 'Trending' page of Tumblr and 60 fan communities ('fandoms'). Comment tags and their identified discourse functions (opinion, reaction, aside) are analyzed quantitatively for differences regarding use, structure, and sentiment. The analysis shows significant differences between the comment tags and traditional keyword tags, as well as among comment tags with the three different discourse functions. The results suggest that social tagging practices on Tumblr are influenced both by the technological specifications of the platform and the social structure of the website.

2017

Tumblr is one of the most popular content sharing websites, where the use of keyword tags that enhance the searchability and visibility of posts is prominent. However, this resource has been creatively exploited by some users beyond its folksonomic use: Since Tumblr does not have a separate comment section for posts, the tag section may also be used for tags with discourse functions such as expressing an opinion, a reaction, or including asides. This article explores the practice of including comments in tags, taking into account the specific technological features of Tumblr's tagging system, as well as the role of the communities within the website. The corpus analyzed in the study comprises two datasets collected from the general 'Trending' page of Tumblr and 60 fan communities ('fandoms'). Comment tags and their identified discourse functions (opinion, reaction, aside) are analyzed quantitatively for differences regarding use, structure, and sentiment. The analysis shows significant differences between the comment tags and traditional keyword tags, as well as among comment tags with the three different discourse functions. The results suggest that social tagging practices on Tumblr are influenced both by the technological specifications of the platform and the social structure of the website.

The images that inundate our online world have the potential to create virtual tourists, meaning Internet users can browse and collect images that most exemplify their interests, emotions, or boredom just through a click of a button. But what happens when these images are used to illustrate identity or even encourage users to put their identities in question? Identity for my purposes here is defined as not only the persona that one portrays but their intersectional locators as well; such as, race, gender, sexuality, etcetera. Many types of images and memes are becoming more and more indispensable to online interaction, including, rage faces, image macros, and animated GIFs. Exploring these images is essential to understand the changing interaction and evolution of online identity politics. Using tumblr as the platform, this thesis presentation is an attempt at an in-depth exploration of how a subset of these images, reaction GIFs, a genre of animated GIF, are used as forms that communicate reactions and emotions and in these ways function to construct multifaceted identity. In particular this presentation addresses the issues concerning race that arise from this new type of communication.

Nmediac the Journal of New Media and Culture, 2014

This article aims to discuss the aesthetic quality, visual experience and social practice of the microblog platform Tumblr. Having passed the 100 million blogs mark, the service has been increasingly prominent online since its launch in 2007. Thus, fashion, mass media and memory institutions as well as other more individual forms of visual expression have found the platform particularity interesting as a source for communication and networking. Disputing Jodi Dean's argument that blogging is an expression of our constantly shifting identities and provoking us to exhibitionism, this article proposes blogging and reblogging on Tumblr as a type of creative curation where digital images and content are in constant flux but always temporarily fixed through the reblog button, re-creating through different contexts and part of identity formations, rather than effects of them. Moreover, fashion is crucial in understanding Tumblr's appeal, not just by way of the style blogs and fashion focus of the site and the ambiguities of its execution, but also in the very force, which drives the blogging in the first place, a desire or addictive yearning. The platform is arguably unique in providing active user participation through anonymity, dialogue, and alternative spaces for interaction and community with a mixture of attention, production and expression, making Tumblr a central case for the future of content curation online.

This project will set out to explore how a new media platform, particularly, a micro-blogging website, Tumblr, aids the popularization and reproduction of Japanese anime/manga culture in the Western Hemisphere. My specific case study will observe the fandom of Attack on Titan, a popular Japanese manga and anime (“animanga”) series created by Hajime Isayama, which has become largely known in the West due to the commercial success of the anime series, fueled by the extensive reach of the fandom. This project will set out to explore how a new media platform, particularly, a micro-blogging website, Tumblr, aids the popularization and reproduction of Japanese anime/manga culture in the Western Hemisphere. My specific case study will observe the fandom of Attack on Titan, a popular Japanese manga and anime (“animanga”) series created by Hajime Isayama, which has become largely known in the West due to the commercial success of the anime series, fueled by the extensive reach of the fandom.

A Tumblr Book: Platform and Culture, 2020

arXiv (Cornell University), 2023

Dashboards remain ubiquitous artifacts for presenting or reasoning with data across different domains. Yet, there has been little work that provides a quantifiable, systematic, and descriptive overview of dashboard designs at scale. We propose a schematic representation of dashboard designs as node-link graphs to better understand their spatial and interactive structures. We apply our approach to a dataset of 25,620 dashboards curated from Tableau Public to provide a descriptive overview of the core building blocks of dashboards in the wild and derive common dashboard design patterns. To guide future research, we make our dashboard corpus publicly available and discuss its application toward the development of dashboard design tools. CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Visualization systems and tools; Visual analytics.

Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on Social Media & Society - SMSociety '15, 2015

We developed a social media analytics and research testbed (SMART) dashboard for monitoring Twitter messages and tracking the diffusion of information in different cities. SMART dashboard is an online geo-targeted search and analytics tool, including an automatic data processing procedure to help researchers to 1) search tweets in different cities; 2) filter noise (such as removing redundant retweets and using machine learning methods to improve precision); 3) analyze social media data from a spatiotemporal perspective, and 4) visualize social media data in various ways (such as weekly and monthly trends, top URLs, top retweets, top mentions, or top hashtags). By monitoring social messages in geo-targeted cities, we hope that SMART dashboard can assist researchers investigate and monitor various topics, such as flu outbreaks, drug abuse, and Ebola epidemics at the municipal level.

Behaviour & Information Technology, 2024

Disengagement from social media platforms encompasses various behaviours, such as reducing activity or abandoning them altogether. At the far end of this spectrum, permanently deleting user accounts holds substantial implications for individuals, the people they contact, and the platform itself. However, the motivations underlying this choice, which involves erasing all content and social connections rather than simply abandoning the platform, remain unclear. To address this research gap, we analysed 4.5 million active users on Tumblr, a microblogging service. We assessed the likelihood of users deleting their accounts using binary logistic regression in general and in specific clusters of users. Our findings reveal that users are more inclined to delete their accounts if they have previously removed content from their profiles, highlighting the role of account deletion in cleaning and controlling personal information. Additionally, we observed robust peer correlations, indicating that users are more likely to delete their accounts if those they follow have already taken this step. We discuss these findings in the context of non-use theories and propose the development of checking-out processes that can enhance the user experience associated with account deletion.