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![[7] From the Sisseton Agency there went down John B. Renville,
Daniel Renville, and Solomon, of the pastors, with several elders and
myself. Dr. Williamson came up from St. Peter; and John P.
Williamson, A. L. Riggs, and Artemas Ehnamane, and others, came
over from the Missouri River. Year by year, from that time on, we
have continued to hold these meetings, and they have constantly
increased in interest and importance. On this first occasion, four or
five days were spent, and religious meetings held each day. The
circumstances by which we were surrounded intensified the interest.
As yet there was no church or school-house in which we could
assemble, and our meetings were held out-of-doors, or under a
booth in connection with Mr. All Iron’s cabin.
[7] This was preliminary to the regularly organized
conference which met the next year.
This colony of more than one hundred church members had
located near the eastern line of Dakota Territory, in the beautiful and
fertile valley of the Big Sioux River. Their settlement lay along that
stream for twenty-five or thirty miles, its centre being about forty
miles above the thriving town of Sioux Falls.
The most of these men were in 1862 engaged in the Sioux
outbreak in Minnesota. For three years they were held in military
prisons. Meanwhile, their families and the remnants of their tribe
had been deported to the Missouri River; so that when they found
themselves together again, it was at Niobrara, Neb., or soon
afterward at the newly established Santee agency a few miles below.
What impulse stirred them up to break away from their own
tribe, to which they had but just returned, and try the hard work of
making a home among coldly disposed if not hostile whites? What
made them leave all their old traditional ties and relationships and
go forth as strangers and wanderers? It must be borne in mind that
they left behind them the food which the government issued weekly
on the agency, to seek a very precarious living by farming, for which
they had neither tools nor teams. They also gave up the advantage
of the yearly issue of clothing, and the prospect of such considerable
gifts of horses, oxen, cows, wagons, and ploughs, as were](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2687532-250603031029-9441201f/75/Analyzing-Social-Media-Data-And-Web-Networks-Marta-Cantijoch-57-2048.jpg)
![homes she helped to make happy she is missed, yet her
memory is an abiding presence, cheering and encouraging.
“‘And a book of remembrance was written before him for
them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name.
And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of Hosts, in that day
when I make up my jewels.’[8]”
[8] Mention should be made here of Rev. Samuel
Ingham and his wife, who joined the missionary
force at Santee immediately after the meeting of
the Board at Minneapolis. Mr. Ingham was
suffering at the time from what was considered a
temporary malady, but which proved serious and
ended his life Dec. 27, 1873. Mrs. Ingham
continued in her work in the “Dakota Home,” the
new school for girls.
The commencement of the Manual Labor Boarding-School on
the Sisseton reserve was an event which indicated progress. Agent
M. N. Adams had received authority from the department to erect a
suitable building. On the 4th of September, 1873, the foundation
walls were so far completed that the corner-stone was laid with
appropriate ceremonies. There was quite a gathering of the natives
and white people on the reservation. After prayer in Dakota by
Pastor Solomon, Mr. Adams made a speech, which was interpreted,
setting forth the advantages that would accrue to this people from
such a school as this building contemplated. He then announced that
he had in his hands copies of the Bible in Dakota and English, and a
Dakota hymn book, together with eight numbers of the Iapi Oaye, a
copy of the St. Paul Press, and a Yankton paper, and also sundry
documents, all of which he deposited in the place prepared for them.
I added a few remarks, and then the corner-stone was laid and
pronounced level. Speeches followed from Solomon, John B., and
Daniel Renville, pastors; and from Robert Hopkins, Two Stars, and
Gabriel Renville. They accepted this as the guarantee of progress in
the new era on which they had entered.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2687532-250603031029-9441201f/75/Analyzing-Social-Media-Data-And-Web-Networks-Marta-Cantijoch-84-2048.jpg)
Analyzing Social Media Data And Web Networks Marta Cantijoch
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- 7. Analysing Social Media Dataand Web Networks Edited by Marta Cantijoch University of Manchester, UK Rachel Gibson University of Manchester, UK Stephen Ward University of Salford, UK
- 8. Selection and editorialmatter © Marta Cantijoch, Rachel Gibson and Stephen Ward 2014 Individual chapters © Respective authors 2014 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2014 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2014 978-1-137-27676-6 ISBN 978-1-349-44680-3 ISBN 978-1-137-27677-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137276773
- 9. Contents List of Figuresand Tables vii Notes on Contributors ix Introduction: The Importance of Method in the Study of the ‘Political Internet’ 1 Laura Sudulich, Matthew Wall, Rachel Gibson, Marta Cantijoch and Stephen Ward Part I Structure and Influence 1 Political Homophily on the Web 25 Robert Ackland and Jamsheed Shorish 2 Blogosphere Authority Index 2.0: Change and Continuity in the American Political Blogosphere, 2007–2010 47 David Karpf 3 Analysing YouTube Audience Reactions and Discussions: A Network Approach 72 Mike Thelwall Part II Contents and Interactions 4 Social Data Analytics Tool: A Demonstrative Case Study of Methodology and Software 99 Abid Hussain, Ravi Vatrapu, Daniel Hardt and Zeshan Ali Jaffari 5 Opportunities and Challenges of Analysing Twitter Content: A Comparison of the Occupation Movements in Spain, Greece and the United States 119 Gema García-Albacete and Yannis Theocharis 6 Stuttgart’s Black Thursday on Twitter: Mapping Political Protests with Social Media Data 154 Andreas Jungherr and Pascal Jürgens v
- 10. vi Contents 7 Analysing‘Super-Participation’ in Online Third Spaces 197 Todd Graham and Scott Wright Part III Mixed Methods and Approaches for the Analysis of Web Campaign 8 A Mixed-Methods Approach to Capturing Online Local Level Campaigns Data at the 2010 UK General Election 219 Rosalynd Southern 9 From Websites to Web Presences: Measuring Interactive Features in Candidate-Level Web Campaigns During the 2010 UK General Election 238 Benjamin J. Lee 10 New Directions in Web Analysis: Can Semantic Polling Dissolve the Myth of Two Traditions of Public Opinion Research? 256 Nick Anstead and Ben O’Loughlin Index 276
- 11. Figures and Tables Figures 1.1US political blogosphere 2004 32 1.2 Political blogosphere 2011 37 2.1 The blogspace typology 58 2.2 Progressive blogs, by quadrant 59 2.3 Conservative blogs, by quadrant 60 2.4 Top five progressive (diamond) and conservative (rectangle) blogs 61 3.1 Reply network from the Wolverhampton Riots video 84 3.2 ReplyTo Network from the Obama in Egypt video 89 3.3 Friend network from the Obama in Egypt video 91 3.4 Friends in common network from the Obama in Egypt video 92 4.1 Schematic of a Habermasian Public Sphere 100 4.2 Distribution of links to top ten domains 109 4.3 Overview of Facebook wall crossing 110 4.4 Distribution of pronouns on Helle’s Facebook wall 112 4.5 Distribution of pronouns on Lars’ Facebook wall 112 4.6 Distribution of pronouns on Pia’s Facebook wall 113 4.7 Sentiment over time on Helle’s Facebook wall 114 4.8 Sentiment over time on Lars’ Facebook wall 114 4.9 Sentiment over time on Pia’s Facebook wall 115 4.A1 Schematic of the technical architecture of SODATO 117 5.1 Evaluation of the movement 141 6.1 Messages on 30 September and 1 October 2010 165 6.2 The five most popular hashtags in message sample on 30 September and 1 October 2010 167 6.3 Comparison of normal messages, retweets and @messages containing #s21 on 30 September and 1 October 2010 168 6.4 Tweet volume per hour (local maxima) 173 6.5 Tweet volume (Retweets) 177 6.6 Tweet volume (URLs) 179 6.7 Tweet volume (peakiness) 189 vii
- 12. viii List ofFigures and Tables Tables 1.1 ERGMs for 2011 political weblog dataset 41 1.2 ERGMs for 2004 political weblog dataset 42 2.1 Progressive rankings, 2009–2010 53 2.2 Conservative rankings, 2009–2010 54 2.3 Average site ranks in the combined BAI dataset, 2008 election season 56 2.4 Average site ranks in the combined BAI dataset, 2010 56 3.1 Sentiment of comments on the Obama in Egypt YouTube video 88 3.2 Topics of comments on the Obama in Egypt YouTube video 88 3.3 Centrality statistics for the top ten users in the ReplyTo Network for the Obama in Egypt video 90 4.1 Public sphere characteristics of a Facebook in particular and social media in general 101 5.1 Number of tweets collected by period and by country 129 5.2 Information automatically retrieved from the tweets 131 5.3 Summary of categories and codes 132 5.4 Purpose of the tweet (column percentages) 135 5.5 Political issues mentioned in the tweets (column percentages) 137 5.6 Political actions mentioned (column percentages) 139 5.7 Types of information distributed in tweets via hyperlinks (column percentages) 142 5.8 Type of sender (column percentages) 143 6.1 Word stems used at least 50 times in any given hour 170 6.2 Top 20 RTs in Twitter messages on 30 September and 1 October, 2010 containing the #keyword #s21 175 6.3 Top 20 websites linked with Twitter messages on 30 September and 1 October 2010 containing the #keyword #s21 180 6.4 Peaky word strems, hashtags and links 183 9.1 Content analysis schema for measuring interactivity in local campaign web presences 244 9.2 Comparison of Web use between Content Analysis (CA) and Electoral Agent Survey (EAS) data 246 9.3 Interactive features in the NW during 2010 general election campaign (N = 204) 249
- 13. Contributors Robert Ackland isan Associate Professor in the Australian Demographic and Social Research Institute, Australian National University (ANU), Canberra. He has degrees in Economics from the University of Melbourne, Yale University (where he was a Fulbright Scholar) and ANU, where he gained his PhD in 2001. Since 2002 he has been working in the fields of network science, computational social science and web sci- ence, with a particular focus on quantitative analysis of online social and organisational networks. He leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks project (http://voson.anu.edu.au) and teaches on the social science of the Internet, statistics and online research methods. He has been chief investigator on a number of Australian Research Council grants, and in 2007 he was a UK National Centre for e-Social Science Visiting Fellow and James Martin Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He is the author of Web Social Science (2013). Nick Anstead is Assistant Professor in Media and Communication at the Department of Media and Communications, London School of Eco- nomics and Political Science, UK. His work focuses on the relationship between political institutions and ideas, and new technologies. Nick’s work has been published in a number of journals, including the Journal of Information Technology Politics and Information, International Journal of Press/Politics and Information, Communication and Society. In 2009, he co- edited (with Will Straw) the Fabian Society book The Change We Need which examined lessons for British politics from Barack Obama’s 2008 election victory, and featured a foreword by the then UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown. He has appeared on BBC television news, BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio 5 Live, as well as numerous regional and interna- tional media outlets. He blogs at nickanstead.com/blog and tweets as @nickanstead. Marta Cantijoch is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. She is also a member of the Manchester Q-Step Centre. She has published several articles on the effects of digital media on citizen politics. ix
- 14. x Notes onContributors Gema García-Albacete is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Political Science and International Relations, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain. Until 2012, she worked at the University of Mannheim where she also completed her PhD. Her research relates to citizens’ political behaviour and attitudes. She is particularly inter- ested in the processes by which political participation and politi- cal orientations develop. Her work on young people’s political par- ticipation in western Europe Continuity or Generational Change? was awarded the ‘Lorenz von Stein’ and the ‘Juan Linz’ prizes, pub- lished by Palgrave Macmillan. She has also published her research in international journals such as Acta Politica and American Behavioral Scientist. Rachel Gibson is Professor of Political Science at the Department of Politics, University of Manchester, UK. She has held visiting positions at universities in Australia, Germany and Spain. She has published several books and articles on the use of digital media in political com- munication, particularly by parties, and for election campaigning and participation. Todd Graham is Assistant Professor in Political Communication at the Groningen Centre for Media and Journalism Studies, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. His research interests include: (1) the use of new media in representative democracies; (2) the intersections between popular culture and formal politics; (3) online election cam- paigns; (4) social media and participatory journalism; (5) forms of online deliberation and political talk; (6) online third spaces and forms of civic engagement; (7) public sphere and deliberative democratic theory. He has published widely in these areas in a number of journals, includ- ing the European Journal of Communication, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Journalism Practice and Journal of Information Technology and Politics. Daniel Hardt is Associate Professor of Computational Linguistics at the Department of IT Management, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research deals with language from a theoretical and practical point of view. His main theoretical interests involve the for- mal mechanisms underlying the construction of meaning in language. This theoretical work provides the underpinning for topics of practical interest to business and society: in particular, automatic translation, sentiment analysis and social media analytics.
- 15. Notes on Contributorsxi Abid Hussain is a PhD fellow at the Department of IT Management, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research interests are in computational social science. His PhD project focuses on the design, development and evaluation of an abstract data model, methods and tools for social data analytics of Facebook walls and Twitter streams. Zeshan Ali Jaffari is a PhD fellow at the Department of IT Manage- ment, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research interests are in social media management. His PhD project focuses on the methods and tools for social media management in order to address current oper- ational issues and managerial challenges in the perception, adoption and use of social media in organisational settings. Andreas Jungherr is a research fellow at the Chair of Political Soci- ology at the Otto-Friedrich-Universität, Bamberg, Germany. He is the co-author of Das Internet in Wahlkämpfen: Konzepte, Wirkungen und Kampagnenfunktionen. His articles have been published in Journal of Com- munication, Internet Research, Social Science Computer Review and Policy & Internet. Pascal Jürgens is a research fellow at the Department of Mass Com- munication, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany. His research interests include political communication, social networks and fragmentation phenomena on the Internet. A second focal point lies in the development of methods suited for the study of digital behavioural data. David Karpf is an Assistant Professor in the School of Media and Pub- lic Affairs, George Washington University, USA. He conducts research on the Internet and political associations, with a particular interest in the new generation of ‘netroots’ advocacy groups. His work has been published in Journal of Information Technology and Politics, Policy & Inter- net and Information, Communication, and Society. He is also the author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Politi- cal Advocacy (2012). He is now working on a second book that focuses on analytics in political activism. He tweets as @davekarpf and blogs at shoutingloudly.com, and his research can be found at davidkarpf.com. Benjamin J. Lee is a Research Associate in the Department of Poli- tics and International Relations, University of Leicester, UK. He com- pleted his PhD in the Institute for Social Change at the University
- 16. xii Notes onContributors of Manchester in 2013. Using a mixed-methods approach, his thesis measured and attempted to explain the use of web campaign tools in constituency campaigns during the 2010 UK general election. Since moving to Leicester, Benjamin has been working on a Europe-wide project mapping and analysing online communication by populist political groups, and he retains a strong interest in online political campaigning. Benjamin’s work has been published in Politics and New Media & Society. Ben O’Loughlin is Professor of International Relations and Co-Director of the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. He is Specialist Advisor to the UK House of Lords Select Committee on Soft Power and the UK’s Influence. He is co-editor of the Sage journal Media, War & Conflict. His most recent book is Strate- gic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order. He has carried out projects on media and security for the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council and the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure. He recently completed a project with the BBC examining global responses on Twitter to the 2012 London Olympics. He has con- tributed to the New York Times, Guardian, OpenDemocracy, Sky News and Newsweek. He tweets as @ben_oloughlin. Jamsheed Shorish is Chief Technology Officer at Uberlink Corpora- tion and founder and CEO of Shorish Research. He is a computational economist, with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University, USA. Prior to his entrepreneurial activities, he was Science Officer for the Informa- tion and Communication Technologies Domain at COST (the European Cooperation in Science and Technology) in Brussels and a professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Vienna, and the University of Aarhus, Denmark. Jamsheed has a background in complex systems analysis and dynamic optimisation, with published work appearing in journals such as the Journal of Economic Theory, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, Economic Theory and Computational Economics. He is currently an associated faculty member at the Institute for Advanced Studies, where he teaches on a regular basis. In 2007, he was a UK National Centre for e-Social Science (NceSS) Visiting Fellow at the University of Manchester, UK. Rosalynd Southern is a final-year PhD student in the Centre for Census and Survey Research, University of Manchester, UK. She has been with the university since September 2008 when she began a Masters in research methods. Her PhD research is centred around online
- 17. Notes on Contributorsxiii campaigning at the constituency level at the 2010 UK general election, with a focus on the adoption and use of personal websites, social media and email by candidates. Her main research interests include electoral campaigning, civic engagement, constituency-level campaigns and the use of new forms of media for political communication, assessed using quantitative methods. Laura Sudulich is a research fellow at the Centre d’étude de la vie poli- tique (Cevipol), Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium. She holds a PhD from Trinity College Dublin, and she previously worked as a postdoc- toral research fellow at the University of Amsterdam and the European University Institute. Her research interests include new technologies and electoral campaigns, electoral behaviour, public opinion and vot- ing advice applications (VAA). Her research has been published in British Journal of Political Science, Electoral Studies, Parliamentary Affairs, Journal of Information Technology and Politics and Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. Mike Thelwall is Professor of Information Science and leader of the Statistical Cybermetrics Research Group at the University of Wolverhampton, UK, and a research associate at the Oxford Internet Institute. Mike has developed tools for gathering and analysing web data, including hyperlink analysis, sentiment analysis and content anal- ysis for Twitter, YouTube, blogs and the general web. His publications include over 220 refereed journal articles, 7 book chapters and 2 books, including Introduction to Webometrics. He is an associate editor of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology and sits on three other editorial boards. Yannis Theocharis is a researcher at the Mannheim Centre for European Social Research (MZES), University of Mannheim, Germany. He was a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow at the University of Mannheim in 2011– 2013. His research interests are political participation, protest politics, new media and social capital. He has published in the area of Inter- net and politics in journals such as New Media & Society, Journal of Information Technology and Politics and Information, Communication & Society. Ravi Vatrapu is Professor of Human Computer Interaction and Director of the Computational Social Science Laboratory (CSSL) at the Department of IT Management, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He is also Professor of Applied Computing at the Norwegian
- 18. xiv Notes onContributors School of Information Technology (NITH), Norway. His basic research programme is to conduct theory-based empirical studies of socio- technical affordances and develop an empirically informed theory of technological intersubjectivity. His applied research areas are social media management and technology-enhanced learning. His current research projects are on social data analytics, teaching analytics and comparative informatics. Matthew Wall is Lecturer in Politics at Swansea University, UK. Prior to arriving at Swansea, he worked as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Université Libre de Bruxelles as part of the ‘Electoral System Change in Europe since 1945’ (ESCE) research project. He is a Marie Curie Research Fellow, having completed a year’s postdoctoral research as part of the Training Network in Electoral Democracy (ELECDEM) ini- tial training network at the Free University, Amsterdam. He completed his PhD thesis on African electoral and party systems at Trinity Col- lege Dublin. His research interests include VAA websites; online politics; electoral campaigns; electoral system effects and reform; comparative politics and Irish politics. Matthew has published several research arti- cles on these topics in a number of journals, including Electoral Studies, Party Politics, Parliamentary Affairs, Irish Political Studies, Journal of Infor- mation Technology and Politics and Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties. Stephen Ward is Director of the Politics and Contemporary History Group and Reader in Politics at the School of Arts and Media, Univer- sity of Salford, UK. He was previously a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He has published widely in areas such as political par- ticipation, campaigns and elections online along with parties’ use of digital technologies. Scott Wright is Senior Lecturer in Political Communication at the Uni- versity of Melbourne, Australia. In 2012, he was Mid-Career Fellow of the British Academy, when this research was conducted. He has two principal research interests. The first focuses on government-led e-participation exercises such as online consultations and e-petitions. The second focuses on the ‘new’ agenda for online deliberation: every- day political in non-political, third spaces. His articles have appeared in Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media and Society, British Journal of Politics and International Relations and Journal of European Public Policy.
- 19. Introduction: The Importance ofMethod in the Study of the ‘Political Internet’ Laura Sudulich, Matthew Wall, Rachel Gibson, Marta Cantijoch and Stephen Ward In this introduction, we outline our understanding of the ‘political Inter- net’ and present the methodologically focused approach that we take to the topic in this volume. We then discuss the growing social and political relevance of the Internet and examine the characteristics of the contemporary ‘Web 2.0’ Internet, before outlining the general method- ological challenges and opportunities that it presents for researchers. We argue that three key characteristics of online political information in the Web 2.0 era shape and constrain any study of the political Internet. These characteristics are (1) extremely large volume, (2) heterogeneity and (3) plasticity. We contend that this combination creates what we term a ‘dynamic data deluge’ for social scientists, which makes dis- tinguishing and recording meaningful information generated by the political Internet a methodologically challenging endeavour. We then discuss how the chapters collected here attempt to make sense of the dynamic data deluge that the political Internet presents. In the course of doing so, we build a picture of what distinguishes social media from earlier types of digital communication and discuss how social media content can be assimilated and processed by social science. We touch on epistemological concerns arising from this discussion before outlin- ing the structure of the book and providing details of the individual contributions. A focus on methods for studying the ‘political Internet’ The purpose of this volume is to describe and evaluate the methodolo- gies that are available to social scientists who study political phenomena using data generated in the contemporary online environment. We use the term ‘political’ to refer to the realm of governance in its broadest 1
- 20. 2 Introduction sense, encompassingcitizens, institutions and intermediary actors, as well as pertaining to their interactions and interdependencies. We thus use the term ‘political Internet’ to designate a system of globally inter- connected computer and mobile devices that both provides a novel space for political interactions and interdependencies to occur and makes possible new forms of communication between political actors. Our principal concern in this introduction and in the chapters that follow is empirically capturing and dissecting the politically relevant information that the Internet generates, as well as providing some guid- ance to researchers on how best to approach this task for themselves, using a new suite of freely available methodologies. Because the Internet is a multi-functional medium capable of facili- tating communication, mobilisation, organisation and networking on a multitude of scales, from the local to the global, it has inspired a range of reactions, interpretations and predictions in both academic and pop- ular literatures (for an example of two radically divergent viewpoints from the popular literature, see Shirky 2010; Morozov 2011). Our goal here, however, is not to explore the Internet’s capabilities and properties from a substantive and interpretive perspective. Instead, the chapters included in this book focus primarily on showcasing methods for mea- surement and analysis of the political Internet, in particular the new processes of adoption and adaptation that are occurring due to the rise of social media. As such, we sit quite firmly in the behaviourist tradi- tion of social research, focusing on observable and measurable political activities that are occurring in the social media environment. According to this tradition, ‘scientific’ social research should make the procedures employed freely available to the public for scrutiny and reproduction; indeed, the methods employed during the research process are a core element of the research content (King et al. 1994, 8–10). It is this methodological openness that allows for the accumulation of public knowledge in areas of social or political interest. We therefore emphasise in this volume the need to develop methods that are both transparent and reproducible in order to systematically increase our understanding of the political Internet. This emphasis on ‘praxis’ or the ‘how to’ of studying the politi- cal Internet constitutes something of a departure from existing work on the topic. Early studies in particular (but also more recent scholar- ship) eschewed an empirical focus entirely and concentrated instead on addressing broader questions about what the emerging technology meant for underlying power relations that define modern political soci- ety. Some enthusiastic visionaries such as Negroponte (1995), Mosco
- 21. Laura Sudulich etal. 3 and Foster (2001) speculated that the profoundly levelling consequences of the growth of computer-mediated communication (CMC) would rad- ically transform political configurations and institutions around the world. As the field has evolved, however, scholars have taken to address- ing these wider questions in a more empirically focused manner, by applying standard social science methods, as well as an emerging array of methods specifically tailored for the online environment to the study of various ‘slices’ or components of political life online. However, this progression has occurred with relatively little methodological introspec- tion, a lacuna that is all the more keenly felt given the unique challenges and opportunities that data generated by the ‘Web 2.0’ or social media Internet offers to researchers. Our focus on the methodological chal- lenges posed by the political Internet thus sets this collection apart from previous contributions in the field. Nonetheless, it is important to pro- vide context and motivation for this study of the political Internet at the outset, which we seek to do in the next section. The growing social and political relevance of the Internet A simple indicator of the growing social relevance of the Internet is the increasing volume of individuals around the world who use it. Internetworldstats.com, a website that amalgamates Internet use statis- tics from around the world, estimates a global total of over 2.4 billion Internet users as of June 2012; with particularly strong penetration lev- els in North America (78.6 per cent), Australia/Oceania (67.6 per cent) and Europe (63.2 per cent). These figures reflect a rapid growth in num- bers of Internet users since the beginning of the twenty-first century, with the same website reporting an increase of just over 566 per cent from their estimate of 360 million users in December 2000. This trend is due both to a widening of access across all sectors of society as the tech- nology becomes cheaper and easier to use (DiMaggio et al. 2004) and to the cohort effect whereby highly ‘wired’ younger generation gradually replaces those generations that relied on the more traditional media of radio, television and newspapers (Howe and Strauss 2000). The shift in generations is not simply one in the quantity of use of digital media, however, it is also one of quality. As we will discuss in the next section, the advent and spread of so-called ‘Web 2.0’ platforms, combined with new mobile Internet technologies in particular, have created a more immersive media experience. The ongoing growth in numbers using Internet technologies and the increased intensity of many users’ engagement with these technologies
- 22. 4 Introduction mean thatthe Internet offers ever more advantages to politicians and those seeking to occupy governing office. In political terms, while the Howard Dean campaign’s innovative use of online technology in the 2004 Democratic primary pointed towards the potential of online cam- paigning (Hindman 2005), the US 2008 presidential campaign is widely recognised as having signalled the ‘arrival’ of the Internet into the mainstream of politics, with Barack Obama having shown how online technologies could generate substantial revenues and drive a successful campaign. Recent evidences from the UK general election of 2010 (see Southern and Lee in this volume; Lilleker and Jackson 2010; Southern and Ward 2011) and Australia in 2011 (Gibson and McAllister 2011) demonstrate that the use of e-campaigning techniques has become almost universal in established democracies, at least among candidates from major parties.1 Political organisations are also increasingly reliant on ‘back end’ web- based systems that are used to store data about voters, supporters and donors. Nielsen’s ethnographic research on American congressional campaigns led him to conclude that the day-to-day organisation of such campaigns is ‘deeply dependent on back-end logistics and increas- ingly tied in with new information and communication technologies’ (2012, 27). Certainly, we have seen considerable divergence in the enthusiasm with which political parties and governments have adopted web technology; however, in some newly emerging social and politi- cal movements, the Internet is integral to organisational infrastructure and collective decision-making mechanisms. The German Pirate Party, for instance, is using a range of online softwares such as ‘Pirate Pad’ (a collaborative text editor) and ‘Liquid Feedback’ (a tool for propos- ing and ratifying policy proposals) to collaborate on policy platforms (Meyer 2012), while Beppe Grillo’s Italian Movimento 5 Stelle argues for a form of direct democracy ‘recognising to all users of the inter- net the role of government and direction that is normally attributed to a few’ (Grillo 2011, 1). Technocentric parties are achieving some success at the polls: the German Pirate Party recently surpassed the 5 per cent threshold imposed by the German electoral system to win seats in several German state assemblies while the Movimento 5 Stelle won over 25 per cent of the popular vote in the 2013 Italian elections, the largest share won by any single party. There is little in principle to stop larger, more established parties adopting similar methodologies – though few have chosen to do so to date. Whether such tools can overcome Michels’ (1915) ‘Iron Law of Oligarchy’ remains to be seen.
- 23. Laura Sudulich etal. 5 Overall, there is little doubt that the Internet is ‘here to stay’ within the political realm and wider society, and, indeed, is likely to become even more pervasive in the short to medium term. The extent to which the medium has now penetrated the daily lives and organisations of the key actors in political life means that it warrants sustained academic attention as an object of study. While there was arguably a lag between the reality of the Internet as an important political phenomenon and its uptake as a legitimate topic for academic study in the mid to late 1990s, there is little doubt that in the last few years, as Chadwick and Howard note, ‘the politics of the Internet has entered the social science mainstream’ (2009, 1). The 2000s have seen an ever-growing number of publications in monographs and mainstream journals exploring the Internet–politics nexus, as well as the emergence of several specialist journals, including Information, Communication and Society; Information Polity; International Journal of Electronic Governance; Journal of Information Technology & Politics; Policy and Internet; New Media and Society; and Social Science Computer Review. However, as noted here and as the chapters that follow make clear, the embedding of the web into our daily lives creates a fundamental tension for those seeking to explore the online dynamics and processes. The Internet is an environment where ‘everything flows’ at an unprece- dented pace, with content and connections constantly being created, amended and deleted. There is thus an emerging disjuncture between the Internet’s permanence as an element of social (and political) life and the large-scale, diverse and highly ephemeral nature of its content. As we discuss in the next section, over the course of its incarnation as a mass medium, the Internet has evolved dramatically in terms of the interactive opportunities that it offers to users as well as the volume and structure of data that it generates for social scientists. The Internet, Web 2.0 and social media as objects of study The Internet is now an established technology that has evolved rapidly in terms of its availability and diversity of uses. The Internet is most easily understood from a technological perspective as a global network of millions of computers (mobile or fixed platforms) connected through a set of protocols and a broad array of electronic, wireless and optical networking technologies. First established in the 1960s as a ‘failsafe’ communication device to serve the U.S. Department of Defense, the Internet now serves as a basic infrastructure that supports an increas- ingly extensive range of information resources and services. The World
- 24. 6 Introduction Wide Webconstitutes one of the most popular and widely used ser- vices running on the Internet. Invented by researcher Tim Berners-Lee in the late 1980s at the Swiss particle physics laboratory, the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN), the Web is a collection of interconnected documents and other resources that are written in spe- cialist computer code (primarily, hypertext mark-up language or html) and stored across multiple hosts worldwide. Through the software of a web browser and the hypertext links embedded in the documents they are easily accessed and retrieved through the ‘point and click’ of a mouse. The visually exciting and user-friendly nature of the Web meant that the Internet rapidly became a mass medium from the mid-1990s onwards, accessed by millions for a wide range of recreational, com- mercial and educational purposes. Although the Web was originally conceived as a technology that would allow all users to view and edit pages, a decision was made in the early stages of the development of Web browser technology to remove the ‘edit’ function (Anderson 2007). This meant that most web users viewed or interacted with content (pri- marily, pages of text and graphics) produced by the ‘webmasters’ – those individuals within an organisation or institution who had mastered html. However, by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century, webmasters were to lose their elite status as new software and services were developed that allowed ordinary users to generate, edit, tag and post content in what Kaplan and Haenlein describe as ‘an evolution back to the Internet’s roots’ (2010, 60). This shift to a more bottom-up, user-generated and interactive version of the Web was captured in abstract terms as a move from a Web 1.0 era to Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005). Kaplan and Haenlein (2010) identify Adobe Flash animation and mul- timedia software, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) web feed formats and a set of technologies and practices known as Autosynchronous Java Script + XML (AJAX) as the technical underpinnings of Web 2.0. Anderson (2007) notes that the Web 2.0 environment is characterised by the presence of several applications and services that facilitate user gen- eration, sharing, editing and tagging of content, as well as the creation of networks of connected users – such services and applications include blogs and blog-creating software, wikis, multimedia-sharing sites, tag- ging and social bookmarking sites, podcasting and social media sites. These technologies both emerge from and contribute to a series of ‘big ideas’ that underpin the Web 2.0 Internet – most notably a focus on facilitating the production and sharing of user-generated content, but
- 25. Laura Sudulich etal. 7 also a deep awareness of network effects and the ‘power of the crowd’, as well as a focus on using large-scale data as a technical and economic resource (O’Reilly 2005; Anderson 2007). In this volume, the concept of ‘social media’ is of particular impor- tance, and we therefore clarify what the term means here. While social media sites are often conflated with social networking sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, we understand social net- working sites to be a sub-category of a broad conceptualisation of ‘social media’. Boyd and Ellison identify the articulation of a list with whom users wish to share a connection as a defining criterion of a social net- work site, arguing that ‘what makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks’ (2007, 211). We adopt Kaplan and Haenlein’s (2010, 61) more encompassing defi- nition of social media as ‘a group of Internet applications that build on the ideological and technical foundations Web 2.0, and that allow the creation and exchange of User Generated Content’, meaning that blogs, wikis and content community sites (such as YouTube) are classi- fied alongside social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter as ‘social media’. A key take away from the preceding discussion for our purposes is that the Internet, the web and social media, while clearly interrelated and interdependent, are not one and the same thing. They form a chronological and technological line of progression whereby the Inter- net forms the underlying infrastructure and ‘root’ network that supports the outward ‘skein’ of the Web, upon which are laid various applica- tions, some of the most popular and widely used of which are social media platforms. From a sociopolitical perspective, they can be seen as an increasingly democratised means of undertaking digital communica- tion, with social media now forming the most widely used entry point into the online world for most people. From an historical perspective, this development can also be located in a wider narrative developed by Bimber (2003), which argues that peri- ods of relative stability in terms of the political control of information and political contestation (‘information regimes’) are punctuated by dramatic technological changes influencing the costs of acquiring and transmitting political information (‘information revolutions’). Bimber argues that each information revolution that has taken place to date in America has led to dramatic changes in patterns of political con- testation. Interestingly, the period between such revolutions appears to be contracting in the Internet age. With rapid advent of Web 2.0
- 26. 8 Introduction from themid-2000s onwards, and talk (among some) of a Web 3.0 era emerging (see, for example, Hendler 2009), we may be in a period of semi-continuous information revolution, which has implications for methodologically rigorous study of online politics, especially in the domain of reliability. While this process is fascinating from a theoretical and normative perspective as noted earlier, our concern here is with how, in practi- cal terms, we can make sense of the growing chaos of bits and bytes that it has released into the world of data analysis. The rise of social media in particular presents a new frontier for social science research methodology to confront. In the subsequent discussion in this chapter, and throughout the contributions collected for this volume, we argue that, in its current form, the Internet presents new opportunities for the study of politics and society, providing digitised and instantaneous data on processes and phenomena that were previously extremely difficult to study empirically. However, this medium also poses novel chal- lenges for researchers seeking to abide by the standards of transparency, generalisability and replicability that underlie the ‘scientific’ claims of empirically orientated social and political research. As we discuss in the next section, a combination of volume, heterogeneity and plasticity makes the contemporary political Internet a unique research target for social scientists, necessitating considerable methodological care. Methodological challenges and the ‘Political Internet’: volume, heterogeneity and plasticity Above, we have referred to three innate characteristics of the Inter- net that we consider to have significant methodological impli- cations for any empirical study of the political Internet. These are the overwhelming supply of information that it presents, the heterogeneity of that information and the plasticity or changeabil- ity of that content. These overarching features of Internet-based political data are particularly prevalent in the era of social media and present major new challenges and opportunities for data col- lection, processing and analysis. We elaborate on these core charac- teristics below and outline how the chapters collected in this vol- ume illustrate some of the key problems and possibilities that they raise with respect to the study of political actors, institutions and events.
- 27. Laura Sudulich etal. 9 Volume First, the sheer quantity of Internet-generated data creates a unique set of methodological questions for social science research. Social media promote the flow of an unprecedented amount of information, lead- ing to the emergence of the term ‘big data’ in discourses surrounding what can be gleaned about individuals and societies from their dig- ital imprints. Big data is collected into large datasets where online transactions become the unit of analysis. This particular type of data often involves capturing real-time messaging, such as tweets, chat- streams, blog posts and their comments, and Facebook walls’ content and timelines. In the pre-digital era, political scientists were primarily responsible for the generation of data that preserved as much as possible of the quality of social and political phenomena via a systematic process of measuring and recording. Such a constraint was useful in that it allowed analysts to exercise a degree of control over the size and quality of the information that they created. However, this process also introduced a certain degree of ‘artifice’ and gave a manufactured quality to data that social scientists were able to generate. The Internet, and computer technology more generally, has introduced a previously unimaginable level of automated or ‘natural’ data production, which occurs as a by- product of the interactions that take place online. The Internet generates an enormous corpus of politically relevant information, and the digital quality of this information means that it can be captured to faithfully reflect its original content. The capacity of online processes to generate enormous tranches of data introduces some novel issues that students of the political Internet must address. Hargittai (2000) argued that the emergence of the Internet as a popular communication medium created a paradox whereby informa- tion abundance leads to a situation of attention scarcity among users. We build on this insight by focusing on the abundance of potentially interesting information for political scientists created by the Internet versus the relative scarcity of systematic methods to capture such data. While there is an enormous amount of data available, much of what is collected is ‘noise’, that is, meaningless data having little to do with the political phenomena that we are interested in. Karpf (2012) points out that large portions of the data that can be harvested online are ‘fake’ having been generated by ‘bots’ created to systematically distort online data. Worryingly for political analysts, Karpf goes on to argue that ‘there is an inverse relationship between the reliability of an online metric
- 28. 10 Introduction of influenceand its financial or political value’ (ibid. 650), meaning that the most relevant metrics for political scientists are precisely those that are most likely to be distorted by professional computer scientists seeking to game the system for financial gain. Even leaving these con- siderations to one side, the vast majority of data generated online are non-political – postings about the weather, sports events and celebrity gossip being some examples. It is therefore essential that social scien- tists studying the political Internet should devise strategies for parsing – allowing them to collect data relevant to their topic of interest, as well as to distinguish such data from non-relevant ‘noise’ in their analyses. Chapters by García-Albacete and Theocharis and Jungherr and Jürgens studying Twitter content in this volume show how this can be done through detection of discernible elements embedded in the users’ imprint, such as ‘hashtags’ – keywords explicitly marked with the sym- bol # used by twitterers to categorise the content of their own messages. By identifying these hashtags, researchers take advantage of the fea- tures of the medium for data collection purposes, and they do so from an extraneous, non-interventionist position: Twitter users employ and develop hashtags for the sake of communication efficiency, unaware of the researcher’s presence.2 Beyond the case of Twitter, the Thelwall and Vatrapu et al. chapters approach the task through a pilot or case study approach, taking a small ‘slice’ of the social media world – comments on a particular YouTube video or on the Facebook wall of a small number of politicians – and then subjecting this text to analysis with purpose built new software tools that parse and extract essential aspects such as tone, focus and demographics of those commenting. It is also important to note that, despite its ever-widening reach and the growing volumes of data that it is capable of producing, the Inter- net is not entirely ubiquitous either within or across national societies. Even within industrially and economically well-developed countries, there remain substantial portions of the public without Internet access, and among those with access, there are sections of the population that never or very rarely use the Internet. More recent studies have therefore suggested that the nature of this ‘digital divide’ problem is evolving, from one of unequal access in the 1990s to one of ‘dif- ferentiated use’ (DiMaggio et al. 2004) in the 2000s, with Hargittai and Walejko finding that ‘neither creation nor sharing (of online con- tent) is randomly distributed’ (2008, 239). Although the implications for social science research of this divide are widely appreciated as a key normative and substantive question for research (Norris 2001), from the methodologically centred perspective of this book, the key
- 29. Laura Sudulich etal. 11 concern arising from the ‘digital divide’ phenomenon is that it gives rise to systematic biases in information gathered online that limit the extent to which social scientists can extrapolate to trends and views in wider society. Indeed, almost all of the chapters in this vol- ume make clear the limitations of their analysis in relying solely on online-generated data, when one is seeking to make generalisations about wider populations of interest. The methodological question of interest is whether the large volume of data generated online can be leveraged in order to produce either transformed datasets or sub- samples that can be used to make inferences about out-of-sample populations. Diversity The second feature of the political Internet that we focus on here is the extremely heterogeneous character of social media data. Data can be transmitted in graphic, textual and audio formats. In order to cap- ture such a diverse mass of content, new tools have to be designed to fit the complexity of the object of study. While this aspect of online political data presents daunting challenges and trade-offs, it also holds the promise of generating data that were previously unavail- able to political and social science. From websites to complex and extremely dense Twitter networks, the digital medium provides for a fresh insight into established subjects of study. The home pages of candidates, for example, as the chapters by Lee and Southern in this volume demonstrate, provide a new publicly accessible and self-defined ‘one stop shop’ and window of insight into campaigns and parties’ core business and goals (Druckman et al. 2009, 345). Social media offer new global and aggregate sources of data on pop- ular behaviour and trends. Search tools, links, comments and ‘like buttons’ on social network profiles all present new means of mea- suring popularity and public interest in people, organisations and events. Tracing patterns of interaction and connection through hyperlinks and Twitter or YouTube networks, as undertaken in the chapter in this volume by Thelwall, can open up the ‘weak ties’ that bind individu- als to a cause or movement. Given the myriad of new types of data that are being generated online, it is not possible for one book to con- tain and describe them all. We can, however, impose a degree of order and aggregation on what exists and based on the analyses undertaken here we divide Internet-based data into two types – network data and textual data.
- 30. 12 Introduction Network data Whileuse of network data in social science was present prior to the arrival of the Internet (Borgatti et al. 2009), the development of the Web and social media has seen an escalation of interest in this type of analysis. Initially, this interest was fired by the new connectivity made possible through the presence of hyperlinks on sites and weblogs, whereby organisations and individuals could interlink on a global scale. Further enthusiasm for the collection of network data has been stim- ulated by the rise of social media sites dedicated specifically to social networking, such as MySpace, Facebook and LinkedIn, as well as a host of slightly more instrumental social media platforms such as YouTube, Flickr and Twitter that focus on sharing of particular media content such as video, photos and news media updates. Thus, in addition to approaches designed to map and measure the broader properties and structure of the networks built online, the focus is now also upon meth- ods that can extract and make sense of those interactions that occur within the new social spaces being created on the Web. The chapters assembled here focus on both. The chapters by Ackland and Shorish and Karpf adopt the structural perspective in mapping the architecture and characteristics of the political blogosphere. Ackland and Shorish address the new opportunities opened up by the Internet in the study of homophily, a widely discussed concept in the pre- Internet sociological research agenda describing how the structure of connections among individuals and actors typically displays patterns of preferences on the basis of similarity in personal attributes or political affiliation. Using social network analysis techniques, they map processes of political homophily in the blogosphere and discuss how web data collection and analysis is advancing the classic studies of network struc- tures and properties. Karpf’s chapter introduces us to the Blogosphere Authority Index, a ranking system for the elite political blogosphere through the systematic measurement of changing traffic, hyperlink and community activity patterns among major blogs. The chapter dis- cusses four main themes related to the structure and properties of this particular network: overall system stability, left–right comparative rank- ings, changes in blog architecture and overall blog professionalisation. Vatrapu et al. takes an alternative approach, offering a closer look at the interactions occurring within those networks. Thelwall mixes the two in that he not only examines the structure of the networks that exist around YouTube videos in regard to their size and density but also pro- vides some in-depth understanding of dynamics within those groups through a pilot study of comments on a speech by Barack Obama.
- 31. Laura Sudulich etal. 13 Textual data The process of extracting substantively meaningful information from textual data represents one of the major challenges for social scientists studying the political Internet. Content analysis of texts in political science dates back over 50 years and is seen as one of the most pow- erful techniques to derive meaningful generalisation from textual data (Hopkins and King 2010). In the pre-digital era, while texts could be multiple and extensive, they were more finite in nature. Only a pre- dictable amount of newsprint, for example, was produced on any one day. As such a multiplicity of methodological choices were open to researchers, starting with simple small N manual approaches that devel- oped into sophisticated large-scale computer-based techniques. In the digital era, the abundance of data available renders the former approach somewhat obsolete as a primary mode of extracting meaning (see Jurgherr and Jürgens in this volume). This loss of the ‘personal touch’ is one that needs some considera- tion. The differences between human coding and computerised coding in terms of reliability versus validity have been summarised well by Benoit and Laver (2006) in relation to the study of election manifestos. Whereas computerised techniques can claim perfect reliability, human coding provides a higher level of validity, as human coders with an awareness of the context can make inferences about content that are (currently) impossible for machines to reach. All in all, ‘it is clear that we need to take advantage of continuing advances in computational techniques for analysing social media, while ensuring that we make the most effective use of methods that rely on human expertise’ (Procter et al. 2013, 209). Automated coding requires a certain structure and volume of textual data and can be somewhat ambiguous in its output – often requir- ing subjective substantive interpretation to be usable as a source of meaningful political analysis. While of course this doesn’t mean that human coding is precluded for digital data as a number of the chapters included here show, it does mean that a bias towards more automation is inevitably introduced to minimise loss of information. One poten- tially promising avenue of research that seeks to address this trade-off is the crowd sourcing of data coding, with large numbers of non-expert coders being used either alongside or instead of automated coding for large volumes of political text (Benoit et al. 2012). However, with large- scale textual data generated online, human coding is increasingly used as a post-hoc check or confirmatory exercise on the results derived from computer-based methods.
- 32. 14 Introduction The chaptersincluded in this volume reflect this tension. The social media analysis of Vatrapu et al. uses the new software of SODATO (Social Data Analytics Tool) to apply a fully automated coding scheme to Facebook wall posts to measure their tone, subject and length. Con- versely, automated systems are used by Jungherr and Jürgens and García-Albacete and Theocharis in their studies to only retrieve infor- mation from Twitter. The authors then turn to manual coding protocols to discern and classify the content of the messages. Plasticity The third key feature of the political Internet that we draw atten- tion to is its dynamic nature, or what we term plasticity. The web, unlike previous electronic and print-based forms of media, is an ever- changing space. Much of the data that it generates are ephemeral and can be subject to almost instantaneous change. Schnieder and Foot (2004, 115) have pointed out that the transience of the Internet as a medium involves two dimensions: content and construction. The con- tent generated online may only appear there briefly and often cannot be traced back (retrieved) over a long period of time. This means that once something is not accounted for at the beginning of the data col- lection process, it is most likely that it will be irretrievable afterwards. Such a major caveat has potentially dramatic consequences for research outcomes, and poorly designed data collection can easily bias results or produce invalid estimations. In terms of construction, Schnieder and Foot point out that ‘web content, once presented, needs to be recon- structed and represented in order for others to experience it’ (ibid.). However, the structures of websites and social networking platforms are not constant – some activities and types of interaction are altered and discontinued, while others are introduced. This means that the recon- struction of collected online content is not always straightforward for data collected over an extended time period, and changes in file formats and software can make it difficult to reconstruct and represent stored digital data in its original format (Economist 2012). The authors assembled here have tackled this challenge with vary- ing degrees of success. Vatrapu et al., for example, study the Facebook walls of politicians daily across a two-year period. Karpf reports the results for the Blogosphere Authority Index over a two-year period as well, although his indicators were measured monthly – blogs’ dynamism moving at a relatively slower pace than that of social networking sites. While there are concerns about the permanence of data produced by social media, it also needs to be acknowledged that social media
- 33. Laura Sudulich etal. 15 sources facilitate the recording and measurement of phenomena that were previously impervious to capture. For instance, public conversa- tions around a particular event or issue that occur on Twitter or the daily output of campaigns are now accessible and recordable, allowing us to measure aspects of human interaction that were hitherto out of reach. And as Ackland and Shorish discuss in their chapter, the lon- gitudinal character of the datasets collected online, albeit challenging, constitutes a new advantage for the study of dynamic social processes of preference and tie formation. These new dimensions of volume, diversity and plasticity that char- acterise Internet data raise important issues for research design and the steps of the research process – data selection, capture and analysis. As we have outlined, the methodologically oriented pieces in this volume have developed an array of replicable approaches designed to maximise the opportunities presented by these characteristics of online data, as well as to mitigate the difficulties that such data present. In the final section of this chapter, we outline some important epistemological considera- tions that flow from this discussion of the characteristics of the political internet. Epistemological considerations We argue that moving forward with the task of extracting meaning- ful information from web-based data requires a radical re-thinking of the optimal manner of approaching the research design process. Specif- ically, we need to revisit the choice between inductive and deductive approaches. The changeability of the Internet means that web schol- ars must be observers of emerging patterns and regularities, as well as builders of generalised theory and testable hypotheses. The dichotomy separating induction and deduction as methods of understanding empirical phenomena dates back to Aristotle. From its origins as a philo- sophical classification, the induction/deduction divide has been trans- mogrified into a core cleavage in philosophy of science. Francis Bacon pioneered the view that induction based on observation and experi- mentation is the true ‘scientific’ method (Moses and Knutsen 2012, 47). According to Bacon, scientific knowledge begins with observation – particularly observation of consistent patterns linking cause to effect – with intuitions based on these observations being verifiable by public and transparent empirical demonstrations employing the experimental method. Popper’s ‘positivist’ conception of the scientific method, on the other hand, is characterised by an alternative process. According
- 34. 16 Introduction to Popperianlogic, scientific hypotheses should be based on deduc- tive inference – scientists develop generalised theoretical accounts of empirical/social phenomena based on logic and on the findings of previ- ous research, rather than through direct observation. These hypotheses must be specified in a manner that can be falsified by specific, measure- able observations (ibid.). Deductive methods are driven by prior ideas, which are used to generate falsifiable hypotheses, which are then tested against empirical observations. Inductive methods employ data to gen- erate ideas, which are then used to generate hypotheses, which are then tested against subsequent observations. In other words, the deductive approach is theory driven, whereas the inductive approach is ‘data’ or ‘observation’ driven. It should be acknowledged that modern political science is dominated by the Popperian ‘positivist’ approach. In line with this tradition, most studies of the political Internet have adopted a deductive approach, based on the classification and interpretation of web content on the basis of theoretical speculations. While this logic deeply characterises social science research, its application to web-originated data is some- what more problematic than to other type of data. This is principally due to what we describe above as the ‘plasticity’ of online data. As we outlined above, the Internet and associated technologies have rapidly changed during its relatively short life as a mass medium and, the audi- ence using these technologies has expanded rapidly. While a hypothesis may be valid at one point in the development of the Internet as a medium, there is no guarantee that it will remain so for a significant amount of time. Furthermore, certain hypotheses may only emerge in the light of fresh technological or audience developments while others may cease to make sense. Karpf (2012, 642) argues that this rapid and continuous changes in both the audiences using online technologies and the types of participation and interaction that those technologies offer – combined with a relatively glacial grant application, research and publication cycle – means that many research findings about the political Internet are ‘rendered obsolete by the time that they are pub- lished’. These considerations would point towards an indicative and highly conditional approach to the study of the political Internet. However, such an approach comes with associated costs. For instance, the lack of universally accepted theoretical classifications of online politically relevant material has produced a multiplicity of rather incon- sistent empirical methods of data classification and analysis. While Gibson and Ward (2000) sought to produce a systematic theoretical and empirical roadmap for further studies of similar nature, the field
- 35. Laura Sudulich etal. 17 has deviated from such a template in a rather chaotic fashion, which makes cross-country and longitudinal comparison extremely difficult. We ought to regard such a lack of consistency as a shortcoming of inductive and ad hoc theoretical and methodological development in the study of the political Internet. Organisation of the book In Part I, the first four chapters look at the capture and analysis of structural features of social media use by social and political actors in the shape of hyperlinked policy networks, blog-based networks and YouTube commenter’s networks. Ackland and Shorish examine the structure and social implications of online networks forged through hyperlinks and demonstrates how a particular statistical social net- work analysis technique (exponential random graph modelling) can be used to map and analyse patterns of homophily in the US politi- cal blogosphere. Karpf follows up with an overview of empirical efforts to define and capture the blogosphere and the influence of individual political bloggers. He applies his index of blog influence across a two- year period in the United States to highlight the changes and challenges facing researchers in the field. Thelwall presents a purpose-built soft- ware tool, Webometric Analyst, that can extract and analyse comments on YouTube videos and map the network relationships between com- menters and comments. These diagrams offer important insights into the extent to which social media generate new patterns of connections between previously unconnected individuals or build communities of opinion and dissemination. The tool is significant in that it allows for an in-depth and systematic analysis of the circulation of and response to individual and collections of videos on one of the most widely used social media platforms. In Part II, the analysis turns to the substantive interactions occurring within these online networks. Vatrapu et al. use a newly developed web resource, Social Data Analytics Tool (SODATO), to capture and senti- ment analyse Facebook group participants and discussion in a recent Danish general election. They compare the consensual nature of online political discussion across the two countries in the lead-up to recent national elections through analysis of the comments expressed on the Facebook walls of the main candidates and the extent of cross-wall post- ings. The findings reveal an interesting picture of divergence, suggesting that social technologies do not necessarily suppress but actually may reflect cultural differences in political participation. García-Albacete and
- 36. 18 Introduction Theocharis, andJungherr and Jürgens turn the attention to the con- tent of Twitter discussion. Key questions posed are the extent to which the Twitterverse can provide a means of tracking and tracing the evo- lution of offline protest: can Twitter messages be used as a barometer for public opinion on key political events such as protest movements? García-Albacete and Theocharis develop several indicators used to com- pare mobilisation processes in three related but different movements: the 15M or Indignados movement in Spain, the Greek Aganaktismenoi protests and the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement in the United States. They show and discuss how data can be collected and analysed to study the aims, repertoires of action and tactics of different protest move- ments as well as evaluations and attitudes of Twitter users towards them. Jungherr and Jürgens illustrate the potential of social media for event detection. They examine Twitter messages posted during one of the heaviest episodes of clashes between demonstrators and the police in Germany’s recent history – the contentious protest against the project ‘Stuttgart 21’. They apply four distinct approaches for event detection on data collected from Twitter during the protest to develop a timeline of the events occurring offline. By comparing the results produced by these different methods, they show how it is possible to identify various discrete steps of the protest, its build-up and its aftermath using web data. Finally, Wright and Graham probe more deeply the question of the nature of debate occurring online, and particularly in informal third spaces, with a multi-method approach that combines scraping posts from sites to identify ‘super participants’ and level of equality of debate within a given forum. This automated element is triangulated with qual- itative coding and interviews to better understand the motivations and outlook of individuals who dominate online discussion. In Part III, in two chapters, Southern and Lee examine a specific area of innovation in the use of social media – election campaign commu- nication efforts by parties and candidates. Both authors aim to develop and apply innovative coding schemes to produce quantitative data to compare and characterise parties’ web campaign content. Southern’s chapter focuses on parties’ use of external Web 2.0 platforms in the 2010 UK general election and proposes a new classification schema for mea- suring their interactivity online. She makes a case for extension of the analysis into a mixed-methods approach that triangulates the quanti- tative site data with qualitative data from a candidate email study and elite interviews. The chapter by Lee identifies some key methodological considerations associated with identifying and researching local level social media campaigns. Through a study of candidates’ web use in
- 37. Laura Sudulich etal. 19 the NorthWest region of the United Kingdom during the 2010 general election he concentrates on the challenges faced by researchers in first locating all facets of an official web campaign. He then establishes a new set of conceptual and empirical criterion for judging the authenticity of candidates’ engagement with the new digital media. The book concludes with a chapter by Anstead and O’Loughlin that provides a historical perspective on current methodological debates. By examining the narratives surrounding the development of public opinion polling, particularly in its formative years, they draw paral- lels for the understanding of new semantic opinion polling (the mining and analysis of large amounts of social media data to make statements about public opinion). Anstead and O’Loughlin argue that new semantic polling offers significant challenges to the orthodoxy of public opinion polling by: blurring the distinction between qualitative and quantitative data; challenging the methodological individualism of traditional pub- lic opinion surveys; and even questioning our basic understanding and definition of what constitutes public opinion. Notes 1. Further anecdotal evidence to support the growing importance attributed to the medium by politicians can be seen in the recent dispute between the two main candidates for the London mayoral election – Boris Johnston and Ken Livingstone. A heated argument emerged in the campaign over the former’s appropriation of the @MayorofLondon Twitter account, which was re-named @BorisJohnson for his re-election campaign. The resultant furore led Johnson to establish a separate @BackBoris account to promote campaign activities (though he nonetheless used the @BorisJohnson feed to promote this new account) (Mulholland 2012). While appearing on the surface to be perhaps a trivial spat, the Livingstone camp clearly felt that the account’s 250,000 plus followers represented a significant political resource. 2. This may, in turn, raise relevant ethical issues. References Anderson, P. (2007) ‘What Is Web 2.0? Ideas, Technologies and Implication for Education’, JISC Technology and Standards Watch Report, February. Benoit, K., Conway, D., Laver, M. and Mikhaylov, S. (2012) ‘Crowd-sourced Data Coding for the Social Sciences: Massive Non-expert Human Coding of Political Texts’, paper presented at the 3rd annual ‘New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data’ Conference, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 5–6 October. Benoit, K. and Laver, M. (2006) Party Policy in Modern Democracies (London: Routledge). Bimber, B. (2003) Information and American Democracy: Technology in the Evolution of Political Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
- 38. 20 Introduction Borgatti, S.,Ajay, M., Daniel, B. and Labianca, G. (2009) ‘Network Analysis in the Social Sciences’, Science, 323 (5916), 892–895. Boyd, D. and Ellison, N. (2007) ‘Social Network Sites: Definition, History and Scholarship’, Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 13 (1), 210–230. Chadwick, A. and Howard, P.N. (2009) ‘Introduction: New Directions in Internet Politics Research’, in A. Chadwick and P.N. Howard (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Internet Politics (Oxford: Routledge), pp. 1–11. DiMaggio, P., Hargittai, E., Celeste, C. and Shafer, S. (2004) ‘Digital Inequal- ity: From Unequal Access to Differentiated use’, in K. Neckerman (ed.), Social Inequality (New York: Russell Sage Foundation), pp. 355–400. Druckman, J., Kifer, M. and Parkin, M. (2009) ‘Campaign Communications in US Congressional Elections’, American Political Science Review, 103 (3), 343–366. The Economist. (2012) ‘Digital Archiving: History Flushed’, 28 April 2012. Gibson, R.K. and McAllister, I. (2011) ‘Do Online Election Campaigns Win Votes? The 2007 Australian “YouTube” Election’, Political Communication, 28 (2), 227–244. Gibson, R.K. and Ward, S.J. (2000) ‘A Proposed Methodology for Studying the Function and Effectiveness of Party and Candidate Websites’, Social Science Computer Review, 18 (3), 301–319. Grillo, B. (2011) ‘The 5 Star MoVement (sic.) Between Utopia and Reality.’ Beppe Grillo’s Blog (English version), posted 23 June 2011, available at: http:// www.beppegrillo.it/en/2011/06/the_5_star_movement_between_ut.html, date accessed 11 March 2013. Hargittai, E. (2000) ‘Open Portals or Closed Gates? Channelling Content on the World Wide Web’, Politics, 27 (4), 233–253. Hargittai, E. and Walejko, P. (2008) ‘The Participation Divide: Content Creation and Sharing in the Digital Age’, Information, Communication & Society, 11 (2), 239–256. Hendler, J. (2009) ‘Web 3.0 Emerging’, Computer (IEE Computer Society), 42 (1), 111–113. Hindman, M. (2005) ‘The Real Lessons of Howard Dean: Reflections on the First Digital Campaign’, Perspectives on Politics, 3 (1), 121–128. Hopkins, D. and King, G. (2010) ‘Extracting Systematic Social Science Meaning from Text’, American Journal of Political Science, 54 (1), 229–247. Howe, N. and Strauss, W. (2000) Millenials Rising: The Next Great Generation (New York: Vintage). Kaplan, A. and Haenlein, M. (2010) ‘Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media’, Business Horizons, 53, 59–68. Karpf, D. (2012) ‘Social Science Research Methods in Internet Time’, Information, Communication & Society, 15 (5), 639–661. King, G., Keohane, R.O. and Verba, S. (1994) Designing Social Inquiry: Scientific Inference in Qualitative Research (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Lilliker, D.G. and Jackson, N.A. (2010) ‘Towards a More Participatory Style of Elec- tion Campaigning: The Impact of Web 2.0 on the UK 2010 General Election’, Policy & Internet, 2 (3), 69–98. Meyer, D. (2012) ‘How the German Pirate Party’s “Liquid Democracy” Works’ published on www.tecpresident.com’s ‘WeGov’ section, available at: http:// techpresident.com/news/wegov/22154/how-german-pirate-partys-liquid- democracy-works date accessed 12 March 2013.
- 39. Laura Sudulich etal. 21 Michels, R. (1915) Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy, translated into English by Eden P. and Cedar P. (New York: The Free Press). Morozov, E. (2011) The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (London: Allen Lane). Mosco, V. and Foster, D. (2001) ‘Cyberspace and the End of Politics’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, 25 (3), 218–236. Moses, J. and Knutsen, T. (2012) Ways of Knowing: Competing Methodologies in Social and Political Research, second edition (Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan). Mulholland, H. (2012) ‘Boris Johnson Backs Down Over London Mayoral Twitter Account’, The Guardian, 20 March. Negroponte, N. (1995) Being Digital (New York: Vintage Publishing). Nielsen, R.K. (2012) Ground Wars: Personalized Communication in Political Cam- paigns (New Jersey: Princeton University Press). Norris, P. (2001) Digital Divide: Civic Engagement, Information Poverty and the Internet Worldwide (New York: Cambridge University Press). O’Reilly, T. (2005) ‘What is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software.’ O’Reilly website, 30 September 2005 O’Reilly Media Inc. available at: http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/tim/ news/2005/09/30/what-is-web-20.html , date accessed 13 April 2013. Procter, R., Vis, F. and Voss, A. (2013) ‘Reading the Riots on Twitter: Methodolog- ical Innovation for the Analysis of Big Data’, International Journal of Sociological Research Methodology, 16 (3), 197–214. Schnieder, S.M. and Foot K.A. (2004) ‘The Web as an Object of Study’, New Media and Society, 6, 114–122. Shirky, C. (2010) Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: Penguin). Southern, R. and Ward, S.J. (2011) ‘Below the Radar: Online Campaigning at the Local Level at the 2010 Election’, in D. Wring, R. Mortimore and S. Atkinson (eds.), Political Communication in Britain (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 218–241.
- 40. Part I Structure andInfluence
- 41. 1 Political Homophily onthe Web Robert Ackland and Jamsheed Shorish Homophily is a central concept within sociological research and describes the preference of actors in social networks to form ties on the basis of shared attributes, such as gender and race, as well as subjective characteristics such as political affiliations and desires for certain consumer goods. The study of homophily can provide impor- tant insights into the diffusion of information and behaviours within a society and has been particularly useful in understanding online com- munity formation given the self-selected nature of the information consumed. In this chapter, we introduce the concept of homophily and show that in order to accurately measure homophily, one needs to control for factors such as group size and the existence endogenous network ties. We then provide a discussion of how Web data can be used to advance research into political homophily, which is the phenomenon whereby people seek out others who share their political affiliation. We con- tend that the Web provides several unique opportunities for political homophily research, but there are associated challenges that must be taken into account. Any research involving Web data for understanding social and politi- cal behaviour should first establish that the observed online behaviour is a valid or meaningful representation of its offline counterpart – this has been referred to as the requirement that there be a ‘mapping’ between the online and offline world (Williams 2010), or that the online data have ‘construct validity’ (Burt 2011). Our chapter discusses the construct validity of Web data for political homophily and offers three tests of such validity. One of the tests is that the Web data display differential homophily, where communities exhibit idiosyncratic tie preferences within their 25
- 42. 26 Structure andInfluence community, rather than a uniform tendency of flocking for the population at large. In this context, we revisit the well-known ‘Divided They Blog’ 2004 weblog network data of Adamic and Glance (2005) and show how a particular statistical social network analysis technique (exponential random graph modelling or ERGM) can be used to quanti- tatively characterise political (uniform and/or differential) homophily in the blogosphere. We use the VOSON (Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks) hyperlink network research tool to construct a network of the US political blogosphere in 2011 and assess how politi- cal homophily has changed since 2004. Complementing the traditional insights gained from qualitative network visualisation techniques, we show that differential homophily has become more characteristic of the political landscape exhibited by weblogs from 2004 to 2011. Assortative mixing and homophily Assortative mixing in social networks refers to a positive correlation in the personal attributes (age, race, ethnicity, education, religion, socio- economic status, physical appearance, etc.) of people who are socially connected to one another. There is strong evidence that people assorta- tively mix when it comes to forming friendships, marriages and sexual partnerships – this is, the ‘birds of a feather flock together’ phenomenon (see, for example, McPherson et al. 2001 for a review). With regard to marriage, research reviewed in the aforementioned McPherson et al. (2001) shows that Americans exhibit a preference for ‘same-race alters’ far in excess of preference for similarity based on other characteristics such as age and education. There is also evidence that people assortatively mix on the basis of political preferences, and recent work by Alford et al. (2011) shows that the correlation between spouses’ political attitudes is larger than for other personality and/or physical traits. A tendency towards politically homogeneous social interactions affects the degree of exposure to different political perspectives, and this can have an impact on, for example, the operation and effectiveness of municipal councils and civic associations (‘crosstalk’; see, for example, Weare et al. 2009). In addition, the concept of assortative mixing assists in the classification of political networks and the factions they repre- sent, as discussed in, for example, Kydros et al. (2012). And in the wake of the mass shooting tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, network visualisations have permeated mass-media outlets to such an extent that the gun control debate in the United States is also best
- 43. Robert Ackland andJamsheed Shorish 27 understood – and presented – from an assortative mixing perspective (cf. Stray 2013). Assortative mixing is thus an important and fundamental aspect of social networks and consequently has received much research atten- tion. However, assortative mixing is simply an empirical measure that describes the structure or composition of a social network (that is, which types of nodes have a higher probability of being connected) – it says nothing about the exact processes that have led to the formation of a particular social network. While it is reasonably easy to measure the level or extent of assortative mixing in a social network, it is much more difficult to discover why people are mixing on the basis of shared char- acteristics. We outline three main reasons why a given social network might exhibit assortative mixing.1 First, there might be homophily – a term first coined by Lazarsfeld and Merton (1954) which refers to people forming a social tie because they prefer to be connected to someone who is similar to themselves. Homophily can, in principle, operate with respect to any attribute – physical characteristics such as race and gender, ‘cultural preferences’ over books and music, and political attitudes. However, when the per- son has choice over the attribute then it is harder to distinguish whether ‘birds of the feather are flocking together’ (attributes are influencing friendship formation) or whether someone is becoming more like their friends (friendships are influencing attitudes and preferences). Second, there are opportunity structures that influence social tie for- mation. In particular, group size is important: the smaller a particular group (for example, racial category) the more likely (all other things considered) that its group members will form social ties outside of the group (Blau 1977). If group size is not controlled for, then there can be erroneous conclusions about the ‘homophilous’ behaviour of differ- ent groups. Independent of group size, the propinquity mechanism can also influence whether two people form a social tie – these shared ‘foci effects’ might relate to spatial proximity (for example, living in the same neighbourhood) or shared institutional environments (for exam- ple, working in the same organisation) – see, for example, Feld (1981) and Mouw and Entwisle (2006). Finally, there are endogenous network effects, which are mechanisms that are not directly related to the attributes of individuals, but exert influence on social tie formation. First, there is the process of social- ity: two people might become friends simply because they are both social people and like to form lots of social ties. Second, social networks tend to exhibit two properties: (1) reciprocity – if A extends the hand of
- 44. 28 Structure andInfluence friendship to B, there is good chance that B will reciprocate the friend- ship; and (2) transitivity – the tendency for friends-of-friends to become friends (this is referred to as triadic closure). It has been argued by the proponents of balance theory (see, for example, Davis 1963) that the social norms reciprocity and transitivity reduce the social and psycho- logical strain that arises from unreciprocated ties and being in a situation where one’s friends are not themselves friends. Reciprocity and transitivity can also impact on the measurement of homophily: if a particular group does have a genuine preference for forming in-group ties, then this preference will be amplified by the pro- cesses of reciprocity and transitivity. Furthermore, if there are differences between the extent of reciprocity and transitivity across different social groups (for example, one race has a cultural tendency to reciprocate friendships or introduce friends to each other), then this may obscure the cross-group comparison of homophily. The problem for researchers studying homophily is that both opportu- nity structures and endogenous network effects can ‘mask’ the true level of homophily in a social network. Currarini et al. (2009) demonstrate one approach for constructing measures of homophily where differences in group size are controlled for. Below, we demonstrate a statistical tech- nique that provides estimates of homophily in a social network, where both group size and balance mechanisms are controlled for. The Web and political homophily It was mentioned in the previous section that there is evidence peo- ple are more likely to be socially connected to other people who share a political affiliation. This section considers how research using Web data is providing new insights into political homophily. First, we dis- cuss how Web data from social network sites (such as Facebook), blogs and microblogs (such as Twitter) provide several key opportunities – and sometimes challenges – for studying political homophily. Next, we examine evidence for whether political homophily exists on the Web and if so, whether it has characteristics that are similar to politi- cal homophily in the offline world. Finally, we consider whether Web data may provide insights into how political attitudes are formed, and we also ask the question: might the Web itself contribute to political homophily? Opportunities for studying political homophily Web data provide several opportunities and challenges for social networks research. This section provides a summary, with particular
- 45. Robert Ackland andJamsheed Shorish 29 focus on research into political homophily. First, Web data are created in a naturalistic environment, and so there may be less problem of recall error and respondent burden with regard to the collection of social tie data. However, there is the additional problem that all relevant social network ties may not be observable to the researcher. If the research aims to, for example, understand the role of social networks in politi- cal preference formation using Facebook data, it may be that significant offline social ties are not represented in the data (for example, friends and family who are not on Facebook). The naturalistic nature of Web data also poses both challenges and opportunities for collecting data on the key attribute of interest: polit- ical affiliation. Focusing once again on the example of Facebook, data on the political preferences of an individual will only be available to the researcher if the Facebook user has decided to fill out the appropriate profile fields, and there may be something different about such individ- uals that make them less representative of the population under study (they may be more politically motivated or active than the average per- son in the population). Also there is a potential issue of the accuracy of the political preference data: with certain populations of study (for example, university students), there may be social pressure to display a particular political affiliation in the Facebook profile that doesn’t reflect the person’s true political preferences. With this caveat in mind, a second major advantage of Web data is that it is often possible to collect complete network data (where links between all actors in the network are recorded). This allows the compu- tation of both node-level metrics (such as degree, betweenness and close- ness centrality) and network-level metrics (such as density and central- isation) that may be important to understand the phenomenon being researched. Whole network data are necessary for being able to model ‘supra-dyadic’ phenomena, that is, where it is not just the direct ties between a person (‘ego’) and his or her social contacts (‘alters’) that are important in understanding that person’s behaviour or outcomes, but also the connections between alters themselves (and, indeed, connec- tions between people more two or more degrees of separation from ego). However, while Facebook might provide an opportunity to collect complete network data for a particular population, for example US col- lege students, it needs to be recognised that this population cannot be representative of the general population. Hence, conclusions that are drawn about the extent of political homophily among college students may not be able to be generalised to a wider population. It also needs to be recognised that for some Web data sources, it may not be feasible to identify a bounded population from which to collect
- 46. 30 Structure andInfluence complete network data. For example, in research on the blogosphere, investigators often need to use ‘snowball’ sampling in order to build their network data because there is no sampling frame from which to randomly sample observations. Non-probability sampling techniques such as snowball sampling typically cannot be used to make infer- ences about population statistics – it may not be valid to make strong conclusions about the extent of political homophily in the political blogosphere, for example, when snowball sampling has been used. Fur- ther, the fact that snowball sampling may be required to construct the complete network may also make it difficult to assess the population share of, for example, conservative and liberal US political bloggers, and this can have implications for the measurement of political homophily (see the following paragraphs). A third and final major advantage of Web data for studying polit- ical homophily is the fact that many Web datasets are longitudinal: research subjects’ political and other attributes are recorded over time, as are their social network data. This opens up the possibility for study- ing how political preferences and social networks co-evolve over time, allowing potential insights into the social processes underlying political preference formation. However, there are associated challenges involved with the use of time stamped Web data in the context of research into political homophily. First, it has been noted that while Web environments such as Facebook provide useful data for social tie formation, they are less useful as sources of data on tie dissolution: people do not tend to ‘unfriend’ in Facebook, because the costs of maintaining a Facebook friendship are minimal. Noel and Nyhan (2011) have shown that homophily in Facebook friend- ship retention can confound causal estimates of social influence. The implication is that one needs to be cautious when using longitudinal Web data (for example, from Facebook) for researching how social ties impact on political preferences, since homophily in friendship reten- tion (people with shared political preferences are less likely to unfriend one another) can exert upward bias on estimates of the extent to which political preferences are transmitted through social networks. Another potential problem with time stamped social network data (both online and offline) is that people can drop out of the sample over time, and if the rate of attrition is related to the political behaviour of interest then differential rates of attrition can impact on research find- ings. While differential rates of attrition may not be a concern when one is studying mainstream political behaviour, it may be more of a problem if the focus of study is on radical or extreme behaviour. That
- 47. Robert Ackland andJamsheed Shorish 31 is, a Facebook user who has recently started engaging in radical polit- ical behaviour might be more inclined to change his or her profile to private and thus become invisible to researchers, or stop using Facebook entirely, and this will impact research into social influence and political behaviour. Is there political homophily on the Web? For online data to provide useful insights into offline social and political phenomena, it needs to be demonstrated that the behaviour of inter- est online has similar characteristics as its offline counterpart. In the context of virtual worlds, Williams (2010) refers to the need for a ‘map- ping’ between the virtual and real world, and Burt (2011) argues that virtual world data need to have ‘construct validity’ in order for them to be useful in social networks research: Do social networks in virtual worlds have the same effects observed in the real world? The advantages of network data in virtual worlds are worthless without calibrating the analogy between real and inworld. If social networks in virtual worlds operate by unique processes unre- lated to networks in the real world, then the scale and precision of data available on social networks in virtual worlds has no value for understanding relations in the real world. On the other hand, if social networks in virtual worlds operate just like networks in the real world, then we can use the richer data on virtual worlds to better understand ... network processes in the real world. (Burt 2011, 5) While Williams (2010) and Burt (2011) were referring to virtual worlds such as Second Life and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), the issue of construct validity is relevant for any type of Web data that are used for social and political research. In the context of using Web data to study political homophily, it is therefore pertinent to ask: is there political homophily on the Web, and does it have the same characteristics as political homophily offline? Adamic and Glance (2005) demonstrated that it was possible to identify assortative mixing within political weblog networks, delin- eating between blogs identified as politically conservative and those identified as politically liberal. The authors constructed two datasets. The first was a single day’s snapshot of around 1500 political blogs collected by searching through several blog catalogue websites, and manually coded by political affiliation (750 liberal and 726 conservative
- 48. 32 Structure andInfluence Figure 1.1 US political blogosphere 2004 Note: Black = ‘conservative’, white = ‘liberal’; node size indicates degree. Source: Data are from Adamic and Glance (2005). Visualisation by the authors. bloggers). On 8 February 2005, the authors then extracted all hyperlinks from the front page of each blog – there was no distinction between hyperlinks made in blogrolls (blogroll links) and those made in posts (post citations). Figure 1.1 presents a visualisation of the 1204 non- isolate weblogs, where the ‘Divided They Blog’ phenomenon identified by Adamic and Glance (2005) is clearly displayed.2 Qualitative analysis (visualisation) of the one-day snapshot clearly showed that there was assortative mixing on the basis of political pref- erences in the US political blogosphere. This was not an unexpected finding, but it is certainly a necessary one if blog data are to have construct validity for political homophily research. A second way of testing the construct validity of blog data for polit- ical homophily research is to establish whether there is differential homophily, that is, are the mixing patterns of the two political sub- populations different in ways that make sense? Alford et al. (2005) provide evidence for the existence of two broad political ‘phenotypes’
- 49. Robert Ackland andJamsheed Shorish 33 (observable characteristics of individuals that are determined by both genes and environmental influences): ‘absolutist’ or conservative who tend to be more suspicious of out-groups, and ‘contextualist’ or pro- gressive who exhibit relatively tolerant attitudes towards out-groups. Drawing from this, one would expect conservatives to display greater political homophily than liberals in their linking behaviour in the blogosphere, and this is therefore another way of testing the construct validity of blog data for political homophily research. The work by Adamic and Glance (2005) also provides some insights into the extent of differential political homophily in the US blogosphere. The authors constructed a second dataset from a sub- set of 40 prominent weblogs (‘A-listers’) and, in contrast to the larger dataset of bloggers mentioned above, this second dataset consisted of blog posts over a two-month period leading up to the 2004 US presiden- tial election. While the larger dataset used both blogroll links and post citations as ties between bloggers, the second A-lister dataset only used post citations. Adamic and Glance (2005) argued that since blogroll links tended to get ‘stale’, post citations were a more accurate indicator of linking behaviour, and this can be seen as a methodological response to a problem that is analogous to the ‘unfriending problem’ that Facebook researchers encounter (discussed above). Adamic and Glance (2005) found evidence that conservative weblogs tended to cite other conservative weblogs more frequently than liberal weblogs cited other liberal weblogs.3 In other words, the sub-network of liberal weblogs had more connections to conservative weblogs than vice versa: Through ... visualizations, we see that right-leaning blogs have a denser structure of strong connections than the left, although liberal blogs do have a few exceptionally strong reciprocated connections. (Adamic and Glance 2005, 40) It should again be noted that Adamic and Glance (2005) did not provide a formal test of differential homophily, but rather used evidence from visualisations in support of this thesis. One of the challenges of formally testing for political homophily using blog data is that one would need to control for differences in group size (it was noted above that different population shares can obscure true levels of homophily) and with blog data, especially when collected using snowball sampling, it is very hard to know whether the population shares are accurate.
- 50. 34 Structure andInfluence A final test of the construct validity of Web data for political homophily research, which is related to the above two, is establishing whether the observed actors are representative of the underlying popu- lation of interest. It was mentioned above that snowball sampling may not be representative of the overall population of political bloggers. But what if the objective is to use Web data to say something about the political behaviour of, for example, the voting-age population and not just the subset of the voting-age population who are also political bloggers? It needs to be recognised that political bloggers and people engag- ing in politically oriented conversations on Twitter are most certainly not representative of the voting-age population. For example, Mitchell and Hitlin (2013) compared US nationally representative survey data with data collected from Twitter in order to gauge the public response to eight major political news events and found that the response on Twitter was much more extreme (both on the political right and left), compared with that in the national polls. Any conclusions about the extent or dynamics of political homophily based on blog or Twitter data need to be qualified, given the sampled observations are not generally representative of the offline population. The above discussion on the construct validity of Web data for polit- ical homophily research has focused on blog data. However, political homophily research has also used other types of online data. For exam- ple, Gaines and Mondak (2009) found evidence of ideological clustering in a subset of members of the ‘UIllinois’ Facebook network, which consists of registered users affiliated with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Huber and Malhotra (2012, 1) used data from a US online dating site to assess the extent of political homophily and found that ‘people find those with similar political beliefs more desirable and are more likely to “match” with them compared to people with discordant opinions’. The authors argued that online dating sites provide a unique source of data for political homophily research because they allow the research to observe political preferences (expressed in profiles on the dating site) before sorting occurs. This overcomes a limitation of, for example, data on married couples where shared political affiliation may have resulted from homophily (common political preference was a factor in their union), shared environment (the couple were exposed to similar exoge- nous factors, for example, mass advertising or changes in the economy) or attitude conversion (one member of the couple influenced the other to change political preferences).
- 51. Robert Ackland andJamsheed Shorish 35 Social influence and political affiliation Unlike some individual attributes (such as age and race), political pref- erences are not immutable: a person can change his or her political affiliation, and a potential source of change is influence from people in his or her social network. But identifying social influence using observa- tional data is not straightforward: without detailed time stamped data on both behaviour and social networks, it is difficult to know whether two people share an attribute such as political affiliation because of social influence (one person influenced the other person to change political preferences), social selection or homophily (the two people became socially connected because of their shared political preferences) or because both people were exposed to the same exogenous or envi- ronmental conditions that influenced them to jointly change political affiliation. There is an active agenda of research into social influence using both offline and online social network data. With regard to online data, for example, there has been research on the spread of health behaviour in an online health community (Centola 2010) and product adoption in an instant messaging network (Aral et al. 2009). While we are not aware of a study that has attempted to understand social influence and political affiliations using Web data, the offline study by Lazer et al. (2008) may provide insights into how such research could be conducted using time- stamped Web data. Lazer et al. (2008) collected data on research subjects’ political views before and after their exposure to one another, and they argued that this allowed them to show how social interactions influence political views. Finally, there has also been interest in whether the extent of politi- cal homophily may be in fact influenced by the Web. In the early days of the Web, two radically different predictions regarding the impact of the Web on politics were advanced. Some (for example, Castells 1996) argued that the Web would lead to a new era of participatory democracy (broad participation in the direction and operation of the political sys- tem). In contrast, authors such as Putnam (2000) and Sunstein (2001) argued that the Web would lead to increased isolation and the loss of a common political discourse, leading to cyberbalkanisation – a frag- menting of the online population into narrowly focused groups of individuals who share similar opinions and are only exposed to infor- mation that confirms their previously held opinions. In this context, Hargittai et al. (2008) used a dataset on A-list political bloggers to test whether the amount of cross-ideological linking among blogs is declin- ing over time (this is proposed as a direct test of the ‘fragmentation’
- 52. 36 Structure andInfluence hypothesis), and found no support for this hypothesis over a ten-month period. ERGM analysis of homophily in the political blogosphere While Adamic and Glance (2005) had a large impact on the search for and analysis of homophily on the Web, there is to our knowledge no follow-up research to indicate (1) whether or not differential homophily is a continuing phenomenon within the political weblog community and (2) whether or not network formation models such as ERGM can provide a good fit for such models, that is, whether or not quantitative evidence for differential homophily can be obtained. To address both issues, we revisit the political weblog phenomenon originally treated by Adamic and Glance (2005). We collect new weblog data in 2011 using a similar data collection technique and then estimate several ERGMs to ascertain whether differential homophily is statisti- cally significant. In addition, we apply the same ERGM approach to the original weblog dataset from Adamic and Glance (2005). We find that differential homophily is demonstrated in the updated dataset, and that the ERGM analysis indicates support for its statistical significance. Data and methodology Weblog data for politically conservative and politically liberal weblogs were collected on 27 October 2011, from two websites which cat- alogue weblogs, ‘BlogCatalog’ (www.blogcatalog.com) and ‘eTalking- Head’ (www.etalkinghead.com). These two sites provide catalogs of ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ websites and provided a total of 973 unique websites, similar to the ca. 1464 such websites collected by Adamic and Glance (2005). With the explosion of weblogs over the past decade, there is no guar- antee that these sites would necessarily hyperlink to each other – to help circumvent this, Adamic and Glance (2005) ‘snowballed’ their original sample by an additional 30 weblogs which were cited at least 17 times by the initial collection. As the total number of weblogs collected was then 1494, these additional 30 weblogs comprise about 2 per cent of the total. By contrast our approach does not utilise blogroll data to examine numbers of citations for snowballing the initial collection of 973 weblogs, and we take these sites as given. The premise here is that there may be a degree of self-selection by weblogs to have their data collected and stored by BlogCatalog and eTalkingHead, and that this self-selection is an ex ante form of snowballing at the level of the blog
- 53. Robert Ackland andJamsheed Shorish 37 Figure 1.2 Political blogosphere 2011 Note: Black = ‘conservative’, white = ‘liberal’; node size indicates degree. catalog. Future research can, however, take the 973 sites as ‘seed’ sites for a larger analysis of hyperlink citations. The 973 weblogs so collected were then analysed by the VOSON soft- ware for hyperlink network analysis4 to generate a full network between them. When isolated weblogs are omitted, the resulting Web network is depicted in Figure 1.2, with the circles depicting weblogs and the ties depicting citations (hyperlinks) to or from other weblogs. The size of the circles reflects how many of these citations there are for each weblog, or the weblog’s ‘degree’. Without the snowballing methodol- ogy of Adamic and Glance (2005), the number of weblogs which cite at least one other weblog (or which are cited by at least one other weblog) is 315, or about one-third the number of sites initially collected. The figure clearly depicts a separation between weblogs which labelled them- selves as ‘conservative’ and those which labelled themselves as ‘liberal’, and reproduces the qualitative feature of Adamic and Glance (2005, Figure 1, 37). Although the graphical depiction is promising, it is unclear whether or not the separation between conservative and liberal weblogs is a sym- metric or asymmetric feature, that is, the graph cannot immediately provide information about differential homophily. To answer this ques- tion requires fitting a model of network formation, and we select ERGM fitting for what follows.
- 54. 38 Structure andInfluence Measuring homophily: Controlling for endogenous network effects ERGM can be used to control for balance mechanisms in social net- works. While a detailed introduction to ERGM is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is useful to understand what ERGM is designed to do.5 ERGM is a statistical technique that allows for the explicit modelling of the dependence among the units of observation, that is, network ties or dyads. By means of illustration, say we have three people: Ann, Sue and David. Assume that Ann and Sue are friends and Ann and David are friends. Earlier statistical approaches to modelling social net- works required the implausible assumption that the probability of Sue and David forming a friendship is the same as it would be if Ann was not friends with either of them. This is implausible because it over- looks a basic mechanism in social behaviour, triadic closure, which is the tendency of friends of one individual to become friends themselves. There are two types of features in social networks. Above we intro- duced endogenous network effects – these are network ties that have nothing to do with actor attributes, but are more to do with social norms. The second major feature in social networks is actor-relation effects – these are network ties that are created because of the char- acteristics or attributes of actors. There are three further sub-types of actor-relation effects: • Sender effects show the impact of presence or absence of a particular actor attribute on the propensity to create, or ‘send’, ties (a significant and positive sender effect indicates that actors with the attribute send more ties than expected by chance). • Receiver effects are analogous to sender effects, but refer to the propensity of receiving ties. • Homophily effects occur when actors with an attribute are more likely than chance to send ties to other actors who also share the attribute. To illustrate the above ideas, assume we are conducting an analysis of friendship formation in a school, and we have collected information on ‘friendship nominations’ (for example, person i nominates person j as a friend), gender and age. Assume that three of the actors are i (female, 12 years old), j (female, 12 years old) and k (female, 14 years old), and the friendship nominations between these actors are i nominates j, j nominates k and i nominates k. These three network ties together form a transitive triad, which is a very common structure in social networks. Why did this transitive triad form? In particular, what social process is behind the tie from i to k?
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- 56. by ten inches,and altogether in the Dakota language, with the motto, “Taku washta okiya, taku shecha kepajin,” which, being interpreted, would read, “To help what is good, to oppose what is bad.” Rev. John P. Williamson, who had the sole charge of it for the first twelve numbers, in his first Dakota editorial, thus accounts for its origin: “For three years I have prepared a little tract at New Year, which Mr. E. R. Pond printed, and I distributed gratuitously to all who could read Dakota. And many persons liked it, and some said, ‘If we had a newspaper, we would pay for it.’ I have trusted to the truth of this saying, and so this winter have been preparing to print one. But I have found many obstacles in the way, and have not gotten out the first number until now.” As it was to be the means of conveying the thoughts and speech of one person to another, it was proper, he said, to call it Iapi Oaye, or “Word Carrier.” The subscription price was placed at fifty cents a year. This was not increased after the paper was doubled in size, as it was the first of January, 1873, at the commencement of the second volume. When the change was made, I was taken in as associate editor, and henceforth about one-third of the letter-press was to be in the English language. By this means we could communicate missionary intelligence to white people, and thus secure their aid in supporting the paper, as well as extend the interest in our work. And, as an attraction to the Dakotas, a full-page picture has been generally added. In starting the paper, the main object proposed was to stimulate education among the Dakotas, so that we were not disappointed to find that, in addition to all that came in from subscriptions, several hundred dollars were required from the missionary funds to square up the year. But we lived in hope, and do so still, that the time will come when the enterprise will be self-supporting. It has proved itself to be an exceedingly important assistant in our missionary work, which we can not afford to let die. With the homesteaders on the Big Sioux, on the 23d of June, 1871, we held our first general conference of the Dakota churches.
- 57. [7] From theSisseton Agency there went down John B. Renville, Daniel Renville, and Solomon, of the pastors, with several elders and myself. Dr. Williamson came up from St. Peter; and John P. Williamson, A. L. Riggs, and Artemas Ehnamane, and others, came over from the Missouri River. Year by year, from that time on, we have continued to hold these meetings, and they have constantly increased in interest and importance. On this first occasion, four or five days were spent, and religious meetings held each day. The circumstances by which we were surrounded intensified the interest. As yet there was no church or school-house in which we could assemble, and our meetings were held out-of-doors, or under a booth in connection with Mr. All Iron’s cabin. [7] This was preliminary to the regularly organized conference which met the next year. This colony of more than one hundred church members had located near the eastern line of Dakota Territory, in the beautiful and fertile valley of the Big Sioux River. Their settlement lay along that stream for twenty-five or thirty miles, its centre being about forty miles above the thriving town of Sioux Falls. The most of these men were in 1862 engaged in the Sioux outbreak in Minnesota. For three years they were held in military prisons. Meanwhile, their families and the remnants of their tribe had been deported to the Missouri River; so that when they found themselves together again, it was at Niobrara, Neb., or soon afterward at the newly established Santee agency a few miles below. What impulse stirred them up to break away from their own tribe, to which they had but just returned, and try the hard work of making a home among coldly disposed if not hostile whites? What made them leave all their old traditional ties and relationships and go forth as strangers and wanderers? It must be borne in mind that they left behind them the food which the government issued weekly on the agency, to seek a very precarious living by farming, for which they had neither tools nor teams. They also gave up the advantage of the yearly issue of clothing, and the prospect of such considerable gifts of horses, oxen, cows, wagons, and ploughs, as were
- 58. distributed occasionally onthe agency. More than this: those who had already received such gifts from the United States Indian Civilization Fund had to leave all behind, though they went out for the very purpose of seeking a higher civilization. They went forth in the face, moreover, of great opposition and derision from the chiefs of their tribe. The United States Indian agent was also against them. Whence, then, did they have the strength of purpose which enabled them to face all this opposition, brave all these dangers? The germs of this movement are only to be found in the resolves for a new life made by these men when in prison! There all were nominally, and the larger part were really, converted to Christ. All of them in some sense experienced a conversion of thought and purpose. There they agreed to abolish all the old tribal arrangements and customs. Old things were to be done away, and all things were to become new. And as they had been electing their church officers, so they would elect the necessary civil officers. But when they came to their people they found the old Indian system in full power, backed by the authority of the United States. Of the old chiefs who ruled them in Minnesota, Little Crow and Little Six, the leaders of the rebellion, were dead; but the others, who had been kept out of active participation, not by their loyalty to the United States, but by their jealousy of these leaders, had saved their necks and were again in power. A few had been appointed to vacancies by the United States agent, and the ring was complete. And our friends were commanded at once to fall in under the old chiefs before they could receive any rations. They must be Indians or starve! Nothing was to be hoped for from within the tribe, nor from Washington. The Indian principle was regnant there also. Nothing was left to them but to seek some other land. One said: “I could not bear to have my children grow up nothing but Indians”; so they all felt. They made their hegira in March, 1869. In this region this is the worst month in the year, but they had to take advantage of the absence of their agent and the chiefs at Washington. Twenty-five families went in this company. A few had ponies, but they mostly
- 59. took their wayon foot, packing their goods and children, one hundred and thirty miles over the Dakota prairies. About midway a fearful snow-storm burst upon them. They lost their way, and one woman froze to death. The next autumn fifteen other families joined them, and twenty more followed the year after. Even one of the chiefs, finding the movement likely to succeed, left his chieftainship and its emoluments to join them. He thought it more to be a man than to be a chief. Existence was a hard struggle for several years; for these Indians had neither ploughs nor working teams. But they exchanged work with their white neighbors, and so had a little “breaking” done. And in the fall and early spring they went trapping, and by this means raised a little money to pay entry fees on their lands and buy their clothes. On one of these hunting expeditions, Iron Old Man, the acting pastor of their church and a leader in the colony, was overtaken, while chasing elk, by one of the Dakota “blizzards,” and he and his companion in the hunt perished in the snow-drifts. Joseph Iron Old Man was not an old man, notwithstanding his name, but a man in middle life. He had been a Hoonkayape or elder in the prison, re-elected on the consolidation of the Pilgrim Church in Nebraska, and thus elected to the same office a third time in the River Bend Church on the Big Sioux. After this, when the church met to elect a religious teacher, he was chosen almost unanimously. It was expected that the Presbytery would have confirmed the action of the church at this gathering in June. But this was not to be. On the seventh day of April, when it was bright and warm, he and another Dakota man, as they were out hunting, came upon half-a- dozen elk. They chased them first on horseback, until their horses were jaded. Then, leaving the horses, they kept up the pursuit on foot, in the meantime divesting themselves of all superfluous clothing. In this condition, the storm came upon them suddenly, when they were out in the open prairie between the Big Sioux and the James River. Escape was impossible, and to live through the storm and cold in their condition was equally impossible, even for an
- 60. Indian. Far andnear their friends hunted, but did not find them until the first day of May. So the hopes and plans of the colony and the church were disappointed. At our meeting, we expressed sorrow and sympathy, and endeavored to lead the people to a higher trust in God. The young men might fail and fall, but the command was still, “Hope thou in God.” Before we left them, they elected another leader— Williamson O. Rogers—Mr. All Iron. The Dakota mission had been, from its commencement, under the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. As Presbyterians, we had been connected with the New School branch. But now the two schools had been united. Many—nay, most—of the New School Assembly, who had worked with the American Board, now thought it their duty to withdraw, and connect themselves and their contributions with the Assembly’s Board of Foreign Missions. The ploughshare must be run through the mission fields also. We in the Dakota mission were invited to transfer our relations. The prudential committee at Boston left us to act out our own sweet will. Dr. T. S. Williamson and Rev. John P. Williamson elected to go over to the Presbyterian Board. For myself, I did not care to do so. Although conscientiously a Presbyterian, I was not, and am not, so much of one as to draw me away from the associations which had been growing for a third of a century. Whether I reasoned rightly or wrongly, I conceived that I had a character with the American Board that I could not transfer; and I was too old to build up another reputation. Besides, Alfred L. Riggs had now joined the mission, and as a Congregational minister he could do no otherwise than retain his connection with the A.B.C.F.M. The case was a plain one. We divided. Some questions then came up as to the field and the work. These were very soon amicably settled, on a basis which, so far as I know, has continued to be satisfactory from that day to this. The churches on the Sisseton reservation and at the Santee were to continue in connection with the American Board; while the Big Sioux and
- 61. Yankton agency churcheswould be counted as under the Presbyterian Board. Henceforth, in regard to common expenses of Dakota publications, they were to bear one-third, and we two-thirds.
- 62. CHAPTER XVIII. 1870-1873.—A. L.Riggs Builds at Santee.—The Santee High School.—Visit to Fort Sully.—Change of Agents at Sisseton.— Second Marriage.—Annual Meeting at Good Will.—Grand Gathering.—New Treaty Made at Sisseton.—Nina Foster Riggs.— Our Trip to Fort Sully.—An Incident by the Way.—Stop at Santee. —Pastor Ehnamane.—His Deer Hunt.—Annual Meeting in 1873. —Rev. S. J. Humphrey’s Visit.—Mr. Humphrey’s Sketch.—Where They Come From.—Morning Call.—Visiting the Teepees.—The Religious Gathering.—The Moderator.—Questions Discussed.— The Personnel.—Putting up a Tent.—Sabbath Service.—Mission Reunion. From Flandreau, the Dakota homestead settlement on the Big Sioux, I accompanied A. L. Riggs and J. P. Williamson to the Missouri. A year before this time, in the month of May, 1870, Alfred had removed his family from Woodstock, Ill., to the Santee agency. The mission buildings heretofore had been of the cheapest kind. Only one small house had a shingle roof; the rest were “shacks.” Before his arrival, some preparation had been made for building— logs of cotton-wood had been cut and hauled to the government saw-mill. These were cut up into framing lumber. The pine boards and all finishing materials were taken up from Yankton and Sioux City and Chicago, and so he proceeded to erect a family dwelling and a school-house, which could be used for church purposes. These were so far finished as to be occupied in the autumn; and a school was opened with better accommodations and advantages than heretofore. In the December Iapi Oaye, there appeared a notice of the Santee High School, Rev. A. L. Riggs Principal, with Eli Abraham and Albert Frazier assistants. The advertisement said, “If any one should give you a deer, you would probably say, ‘You make
- 63. me glad.’ Buthow much more would you be glad if one should teach you how to hunt and kill many deer. So, likewise, if one should teach you a little wisdom he would make you glad, but you would be more glad if one taught you how to acquire knowledge.” This the Santee High School proposed to do. On reaching the Santee, I met by appointment Thomas L. Riggs, who had come on from Chicago at the end of his second seminary year. Together we proceeded up to Fort Sully, where we spent a good part of the summer that remained. But this, with what came of our visit, will be related in a following chapter. In the autumn I returned to Good Will, and the winter was one of work, on the line which we had been following. During the early part of this winter, 1871-72, a change was made of agents at Sisseton; Dr. J. W. Daniels resigned, and Rev. M. N. Adams came in his place. Dr. Daniels was Bishop Whipple’s appointee, and, as the Episcopalians were not engaged in the missionary work on this reservation, it was evidently proper, under the existing circumstances, that the selection should be accorded to the American Board. As, many years before, Mr. Adams had been a missionary among a portion of these people, he came as United States Indian agent, with an earnest wish to forward in all proper ways the cause of education and civilization and the general uplifting of the whole people. He met with a good deal of opposition, but continued to be agent more than three years, and left many memorials of his interest and efficiency, in the school-houses he erected, as well as in the hearts of the Christian people. The object that had been paramount in taking our family to Beloit in 1865 was but partly accomplished when Mary died in the spring of 1869. Since that time three years had passed. Robert had gone back to Beloit to school, and was now ready to enter the freshman class of the college. Cornelia was in her fourteenth year, and her education only fairly begun. It was needful that she should have the advantages of a good school. To accomplish my desire for their education it seemed best to reoccupy our vacant house. That
- 64. spring of 1872,I was commissioner from the Dakota Presbytery to the General Assembly, which met in Detroit. At the close of the assembly, I went down to Granville, Ohio, and, in accordance with an arrangement previously made, I married Mrs. Annie Baker Ackley, who had once been a teacher with us at Hazelwood, and more recently had spent several years in the employ of the American Missionary Association, in teaching the freedmen. We at once proceeded to the Good Will mission station, where the summer was spent, and then in the autumn opened our house in Beloit. The meeting of the ministers and elders and representatives of the Dakota churches, which was held with the River Bend church on the Big Sioux, had been found very profitable to all. At that time a like conference had been arranged for, to meet on the 25th of June, 1872, with the church of Good Will, on the Sisseton reservation. The announcement was made in the April Iapi Oaye. In the invitation nine churches are mentioned, viz.: The Santee, Yankton, River Bend, Lac-qui-parle, Ascension, Good Will, Buffalo Lake, Long Hollow, and Kettle Lakes. It was said that subjects interesting and profitable to all would be discussed; and especially was the presence of the Holy Spirit desired and prayed for, since, without God present with us, the assembly would be only a dead body. In the green month of June, when the roses on the prairie began to bloom, then they began to assemble at our Dakota Conference. Dr. T. S. Williamson came up from his home at St. Peter —200 miles. John P. Williamson, from the Yankton agency, and A. L. Riggs, from Santee, brought with them Rev. Joseph Ward, pastor of the Congregational Church in Yankton. As they came by Sioux Falls and Flandreau, their whole way would not be much under 300 miles. Thomas L. Riggs, who had commenced his new station in the close of the winter, came across the country from Fort Sully on horseback, a distance of about 220 miles, having with him a Dakota guide and soldier guard. They rode it in less than five days. From all parts came the Dakota pastors and elders and messengers of the churches. The gathering was so large that a booth was made for the Sabbath service. It was an inspiration to us all. It was unanimously
- 65. voted to holdthe next year’s meeting with the Yanktons at the Yankton agency. At the Sisseton agency, in the month of September, a semi- treaty was made by Agents M. N. Adams and W. H. Forbes, and James Smith, Jr., of St. Paul, United States commissioners, with the Dakota Indians of the Lake Traverse and Devil’s Lake reservations, by which they relinquish all their claim on the country of North- eastern Dakota through which the Northern Pacific Railroad runs. By this arrangement, education would have been made compulsory, and the men would have been enabled to obtain patents for their land within some reasonable time; but the Senate struck out everything except the ceding of the land and the compensation therefor. Our legislators do not greatly desire that Indians should become white men. When Thanksgiving Day came this year, Mr. Adams dedicated a fine brick school-house, which he had that summer erected, in the vicinity of the agency. Of this occasion he wrote, “It was indeed a day of thanksgiving and praise with us, and to me an event of the deepest interest. And I hope that good and lasting impressions were made there upon the minds of some of this people.” In the work of Bible translation, I had been occupied with the book of Daniel in the summer, and, in the winter that followed, my first copy of the Minor Prophets was made. When the spring came, I hied away to the Dakota country. This time my course was to the Missouri River. Thomas had been married in Bangor, Me., to Nina Foster, daughter of Hon. John B. Foster, and sister of Mrs. Charles H. Howard of the Advance. They came west, and, as the winter was not yet past, Thomas went on from Chicago alone, and Nina remained with her sister until navigation should open. And so it came to pass that she and I were company for each other to Fort Sully. As we left Yankton in the stage for Santee, where we were to stop a few days and wait for an up-river boat, an incident occurred which must have been novel to the girl from Bangor. The day was just breaking when the stage had made out its complement of passengers, except one. There were six men on the two seats before
- 66. us, and Ninaand I were behind. At a little tavern in the suburbs of the town, the ninth passenger was taken in. As he came out we could see that he was the worse for drinking. I at once shoved over to the middle of the seat, and let him in by my side. He turned out to be a burly French half-breed, or a Frenchman who had a Dakota family. We had gone but a little distance, when he said he was going to smoke. I objected to his smoking inside the stage. He begged the lady’s pardon a thousand times, but said he must smoke. By this time he had hunted in his pockets, but did not find his pipe. “O mon pipe!” The stage-driver must turn around and go back—it cost $75. He worked himself and the rest of us into quite an excitement. By and by he said to me: “Do you know who I am?” I said I did not. He said, “I am Red Cloud, and I have killed a great many white men.” “Ah,” said I, “you are Red Cloud? I do not believe you can talk Dakota”—and immediately I commenced talking Dakota. He turned around and stared at me. “Who are you?” he said. From that moment he was my friend, and ever so good. It was now the month of May, but there were deep snow banks still in the ravines on the north side of the river. A terrible storm had swept over the country from the north-east about the middle of April. A hundred Indian ponies and forty or fifty head of cattle at the Santee agency had perished. This made spring work go heavily. I was interested in examining the building erected last summer for the girls’ boarding-school. It should have been completed before the winter came on, according to the agreement. But now it is intended to have it ready for occupancy the first of September. When finished, it will accommodate twenty or twenty-four girls and also the lady teachers. On the Sabbath we spent there, I preached in the morning, and Pastor Artemas Ehnamane preached in the afternoon. The Word Carrier tells a good story of this Santee pastor. In his younger days, Ehnamane was one of the best Dakota hunters. Tall and straight as an arrow, he was literally as swift as a deer. And he learned to use a gun with wonderful precision. Only a few years before this time, I was traveling with him, when, in the evening, he took his gun and
- 67. went around alake, and brought into camp twelve large ducks. He had shot three times. Well, in the fall of 1872 his church gave him a vacation of six weeks, and “he turned his footsteps to the wilds of the Running Water, where his heart grew young, and his rifle cracked the death- knell of the deer and antelope. “Being on the track of the hostile Sioux who go to fight the Pawnees, one evening he found himself near a camp of the wild Brules. He was weak, they were strong and perhaps hostile. It was time for him to show his colors. His kettles were filled to the brim. The proud warriors were called, and as they filled their mouths with his savory meat, he filled their ears with the sound of the Gospel trumpet, and gave them their first view of eternal life. Thus the deer hunt became a soul hunt. The wild Brules grunted their friendly ‘yes,’ as they left Ehnamane’s teepee, their mouths filled with venison, and their hearts with the good seed of truth, from which some one will reap the fruit after many days.” On the 13th of June, 1873, the second regular annual meeting of the Dakota Conference commenced its sessions at Rev. John P. Williamson’s mission at the Yankton agency. The Word Carrier for August says this was a very full meeting: “Every missionary and assistant missionary, except Mrs. S. R. Riggs and W. K. Morris, was present, also every native preacher and a full list of other delegates.” I came down from Fort Sully with T. L. Riggs and his wife, who had only joined him a few weeks before. Martha Riggs Morris and her two children came over from Sisseton—three hundred miles—with the Dakota delegation. They had a hard journey. The roads were bad and the streams were flooded. There was no way of crossing the Big Sioux except by swimming, and those who could not swim were pulled over in a poor boat improvised from a wagon-bed. It was not without a good deal of danger. Those from the Santee agency had only the Missouri River to cross, and a day’s journey to make. The interest of our meeting was greatly increased by the presence of Rev. S. J. Humphrey, D.D., District Secretary of the
- 68. American Board, Chicago;and Rev. E. H. Avery, pastor of the Presbyterian church in Sioux City. Mr. Williamson’s new chapel made a very pleasant place for the gatherings. Pastoral Support, Pastoral Visitation, and Vernacular Teaching were among the live topics discussed. Their eager consideration and prompt discussion of these questions were in strong contrast with the stolid indifference and mulish reticence of the former life of these native Dakotas, and showed the working of a superhuman agency. Our friend S. J. Humphrey wrote and published a very life-like description of what he saw and heard on this visit, and it does me great pleasure to let him bear testimony to the marvels wrought by the power of the Gospel of Christ. “The annual meeting of the Dakota Mission was held at Yankton agency, commencing June 13. We esteem it a rare privilege to have been present on that occasion and to have seen with our own eyes the marvelous transformations wrought by the Gospel among this people. Thirty-six hours by rail took us to Yankton, the border town of civilization. Twelve hours more in stage and open wagon along the north bank of the Missouri—the Big Muddy, as the Indians rightly call it—carried us sixty miles into the edge of the vast open prairie, and into the heart of the Yankton reservation. Here, scattered up and down the river bottom for thirty miles, live the Yanktons, one of the Dakota bands, about 2000 in number. Thirty miles below, on the opposite bank, in Nebraska, are the Santees. Up the river for many hundreds of miles at different points other reservations are set off, while several wilder bands still hunt the buffalo on the wide plains that stretch westward to the Black Hills. The Sissetons, another family of this tribe, are located near Lake Traverse, on the eastern boundary of Dakota Territory. This is the field of the Dakota Mission. The chief bands laid hold of thus far are the Sisseton, the Santee, and the Yankton. A new point has recently been taken at Fort Sully, among the Teetons. “It was from these places, lying apart in their extremes at least 300 miles, that more than a hundred Indians gathered at this annual
- 69. meeting. On Thursdayafternoon the hospitable doors of Rev. J. P. Williamson’s spacious log house opened just in time to give us shelter from a fierce storm of wind and rain. The next morning the Santees, fifty of them from the Pilgrim Church, some on foot, some on pony-back, and a few in wagons, straggled in, and pitched their camp, in Indian fashion, on the open space near the mission house. About noon the Sissetons appeared, a dilapidated crowd of more than forty, weary and foot-sore with their 300 miles tramp through ten tedious days. Among them was one white person, a woman, with her two children, the youngest an infant, not a captive, but a missionary’s wife, traveling thus among a people whom the Gospel had made captives themselves, chiefly through the labors of an honored father and a mother of blessed memory. It intimates the courage and endurance needed for such a trip to know that there were almost no human habitations on the way, and that swollen rivers were repeatedly crossed in the wagon-box, stripped of its wheels and made sea-worthy by canvas swathed underneath. “An hour afterward, from 200 miles in the opposite direction, the Fort Sully delegation appeared. For Father Riggs, and the younger son, famous as a hard rider, this journey was no great affair. But the tenderly reared young wife—how she could endure the five days of wagon and tent life is among the mysteries. “That this was no crowd of Indian revellers come to a sun dance (as it might have been of yore) was soon manifest. The first morning after their arrival, a strange, chanting voice, like that of a herald, mingled with our day-break dreams. Had we been among the Mussulmans we should have thought it the muezzin’s cry. Of course, all was Indian to us, but we learned afterward that it was indeed a call to prayer, with this English rendering:— “‘Morning is coming! Morning is coming! Wake up! Wake up! Come to sing! Come to pray!’ “In a few minutes, for it does not take an Indian long to dress, the low cadence of many voices joining in one of our own familiar tunes rose sweetly on the air, telling us that the day of their glad
- 70. solemnities had begun.This was entirely their own notion, and was repeated each of the four days we were together. “On this same morning another sharp contrast of the old and the new appeared. By invitation of the elder Williamson, we took a walk among the teepees of the natives who live on the ground. Passing, with due regard for Dakota etiquette, those which contained only women, we came to one which we might properly enter. The inmates were evidently of the heathen party. A man, apparently fifty, sat upon a skin, entirely nude save the inevitable blanket, which he occasionally drew up about his waist. A lad of sixteen, in the same state, lounged in an obscure corner. The mother, who, we learned, occasionally attended meeting, wore a drabbled dress, doubtless her only garment. Two or three others were present in different stages of undress, and all lazy, stolid, dirty. As we looked into these impassive faces we could understand the saying of one of the missionaries, that when you first speak to an audience of wild Indians you might as well preach to the back of their heads, so far as any responsive expression is concerned. And yet, now and then, the dull glow of a latent ferocity would light up the eye, like that of a beast of prey looking for his next meal. Alas! for the noble red man! In spite of what the poets say, we found him a filthy, stupid savage. All this we have time to see while Mr. Williamson talks to them in the unknown tongue. But now the little church bell calls us to the mission chapel. It is already filled—the men on one side, the women on the other. The audience numbers perhaps two hundred. “All classes and ages are there. All are decently dressed. Were it not for the dark faces, you would not distinguish them from an ordinary country congregation. The hymn has already been given out, and each, with book in hand, has found the place. The melodeon sets the tune, and then, standing, they sing. It is no weak-lunged performance, we can assure you. Not altogether harmonious, perhaps, but vastly sweeter than a war-whoop, we fancy; certainly hearty and sincere, and, we have no doubt, an acceptable offering of praise. A low-voiced prayer, by a native pastor, uttered with reverent unction, follows. Another singing, and then the
- 71. sermon. One ofthe Renvilles is the preacher. We do not know what it is all about. But the ready utterance, the mellifluent flow of words, the unaffected earnestness of the speaker, and the fixed attention of the audience, mark it as altogether a success. While he speaks to the people, we study their faces. They are certainly a great improvement upon those we saw in the teepee. But not one or two generations of Christian life will work off the stupid, inexpressive look that ages of heathenism have graven into them. There is a steady gain, however. Just as in a dissolving view there come slowly out on the canvas glimpses of a fair landscape, mingling strangely with the dim outlines of the disappearing old ruin, so there is struggling through these stony faces an expression of the new creation within, the converted soul striving to light up and inform the hard features, and displace the ruin of the old savage life. But the poor women! Their case is even worse. They start from a lower plane. Some of these are young, some are mothers with their infants, many are well treated wives, not a few take part with propriety in the women’s meetings, and yet you look in vain among them all for one happy face. They wear a beaten and abused look, as if blows and cruelty had been their daily lot, as if they lived even only by sufferance. This is the settled look of their faces when in repose. But speak to them; let the missionary tell them you are their friend; and their eyes light up with a gentle gladness, showing that a true womanly soul only slumbers in them. This came out beautifully at a later point in the meeting. A motion was about to be put, when some one insisted that on that question the women should express their minds. This was cordially assented to, and they were requested to stand with the men in a rising vote. The girls, of course, giggled; but the women modestly rose in their places, and it was worth a trip all the way from Chicago to see the look of innocent pride into which their sad faces were for once surprised. “But sermon is done. There is another loud-voiced hymn, and then the meeting of days is declared duly opened. It is to be a composite, a session of Presbytery, for they happen to have taken that form, and a Conference of churches. A leading candidate for
- 72. moderator is Ehnamane,a Santee pastor. How far the fact that he is a great hunter and a famous paddleman affects the vote we can not say. This may have had more weight: his father was a great conjurer and war prophet. Before he died he said to his son:— “‘The white man is coming into the country, and your children may learn to read. But promise me that you will never leave the religion of your ancestors.’ “He promised. And he says now that had the Minnesota outbreak not come, in which his gods were worsted by the white man’s God, he would have kept true to his pledge. As it is, he now preaches the faith which once he destroyed, and they make him moderator. “We will not follow the meeting throughout the days. There are resolutions and motions to amend and all that, just like white folks, and plenty of speech-making. Now a telling hit sends a ripple of laughter through the room; and now the moistened eyes and trembling lip tell that some deep vein of feeling has been touched. Grave questions are under discussion: Pastoral Support, opening out into general benevolence; Pastoral Visitation, its necessity, methods, difficulties, and also as a work pertaining to elders, deacons, and to the whole membership; Primary Education—shall it be in the vernacular or in English? a most spirited debate, resulting in this: ‘Resolved, That so long as the children speak the Dakota at home, education should be begun in the Dakota.’ Then the Iapi Oaye, the Word Carrier—for they have their newspaper, and it has its financial troubles—comes up. All rally to its support. But the hundred-dollar deficit for last year, that, we suspect, comes out of the missionaries’ meagre salaries. All along certain more strictly ecclesiastical matters are mingled in. James Red-Wing is brought forward to be approbated as a preacher at Fort Sully. An application is considered for forming a new church on the Sisseton reserve. The church at White Banks asks aid for a church building, and a Yankton elder is examined and received as a candidate for the ministry. The Indians, in large numbers, share freely in all these deliberations. Everything is decorous and dignified, sometimes evidently intensely interesting,
- 73. we the whileburning to know what they are saying, and getting the general drift only through a friendly whisper in the ear. While they are discussing, we will make a few notes: about one-third of these before us were imprisoned for the massacre of 1862, although, probably, none of them took active part in it. The larger portion of them were made freemen of the Lord in that great prison revival at Mankato, as a result of which 300 joined the church in one day. They were also of that number who, when being transferred by steamer to Davenport, ‘passed St. Paul in chains, indeed, but singing the fifty-first Psalm, to the tune of Old Hundred. Seven of these men are regularly ordained ministers, pastors of as many churches; two others are licentiate preachers. Quite a number are teachers, deacons, elders, or delegates of the nine churches belonging to the mission, and they report a goodly fellowship of 775 Dakota members, 79 of whom have come into the fold since the last meeting. “Two or three of these men are of some historic note. John B. Renville, who sits at the scribe’s desk, was the main one in inaugurating the counter revolution in the hostilities of 1862. Yonder is Peter Big-Fire, who, by his address, turned the war party from the trail of the fleeing missionaries. And there is Gray-Cloud, for five years in the United States army, a sergeant of scouts; and Chaskadan, the Elder Brewster of the prison church; and Lewis Mazawakinyanna, formerly chaplain among the fort scouts, now pastor of Mayasan Church, and Hokshidanminiamani, once a conjurer, now no longer raising spirits in the teepee, but humbly seeking to be taught of the Divine Spirit;—and all these—ah! our eyes fill with tears as we think that but for the blessed Gospel they would still be worshipers of devils. “The meeting is adjourned, and the brethren are coming forward to greet us. We never grasped hands with a heartier good- will. But somehow our sense of humor will not be altogether quiet as, one after another, we are introduced to Elder Big-Fire, Rev. Mr. All-good, Deacon Boy-that-walks-on-the-water, Pastor Little-Iron- Thunder, Elder Gray-Cloud, and Rev. Mr. Stone-that-paints-itself-red.
- 74. But they aregrand men, and their names are quite as euphonious as some English ones we could pick out. “While supper is preparing, we will look a moment at a phase of tent life. A sudden gust of wind has blown over two of the large teepees. And now they are to be set up again. One is occupied by the men, the other by the women. Under the old régime the women do all this kind of work. But now the men are willing to try their hand at it, at least upon their own tent. It is new work, however, and, while they are making futile attempts at tying together the ends of the first three poles, the mothers and wives have theirs already up and nearly covered. At length a broad-chested woman steps over among them, strips off their ill tied strings, repacks the ends of the poles, and with two or three deft turns binds them fast, and all with a kind of nervous contempt as if she were saying—she probably is: ‘Oh, you stupid fellows!’ The after work does not seem to be much more successful, and they stand around in a helpless sort of way, while the young women are evidently bantering them with good- natured jests, much as a bevy of white girls would do in seeing a man vainly trying to stitch on a missing button, each new bungling mistake drawing the fire of the fair enemy in a fresh explosion of laughter. How the thing comes out we do not stay to see, but we suspect that the practised hands of the good women finally come to the rescue. “Sunday is the chief day of interest, and yet there is less to report about that. In the morning, at nine o’clock, Rev. A. L. Riggs conducts a model Bible class, with remarks on the art of questioning. At the usual hour of service the church is crowded, and Rev. Solomon Toonkanshaichiye preaches, we doubt not, a most excellent sermon. Immediately following is the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper with the fathers of the mission, Revs. Dr. Riggs and Williamson officiating, a tender and solemn scene, impressive even to us who understand no single word of the service, for grave Indian deacons reverently pass the elements; and many receive them which but for a knowledge of this dear sacrifice might have reckoned it their chief glory that their hands were stained with human blood.
- 75. “Just as weclose, in strange contrast with the spirit of the hour, two young Indian braves go by the windows. They are tricked out with all manner of savage frippery. Ribbons stream in the wind, strings of discordant sleigh-bells grace their horses’ necks and herald their approach. Each carries a drawn sword which flashes in the sunlight, and a plentiful use of red ochre and eagles’ feathers completes the picture. As they ride by on their scrawny little ponies the effect is indescribably absurd. But they think it very fine, and, like their cousins, the white fops, have simply come to show themselves. “In the afternoon is an English service, and then one wholly conducted by the natives themselves. No evening meetings are held, as these people that rise with the birds are not far behind them in going to their rest. On Monday the business is finished, and the farewells are said. And on Tuesday morning the various delegations start for their distant homes. “We have no space to speak of the meeting of the mission proper. It was held at Mr. Williamson’s house during the evenings. Nearly all its members were present,—a delightful reunion it was to them and us,—and many questions of serious interest were amply discussed. “We dare not trust our pen to write about these noble men and women as we would. The results of their labors abundantly testify for them, and their record is on high. May they receive an hundredfold for their work of faith, and labor of love, and patience of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ.”
- 76. CHAPTER XIX. 1873-1874.—The AmericanBoard at Minneapolis.—The Nidus of the Dakota Mission.—Large Indian Delegation.—Ehnamane and Mazakootemane.—“Then and Now.”—The Woman’s Meeting.— Nina Foster Riggs and Lizzie Bishop—Miss Bishop’s Work and Early Death.—Manual Labor Boarding-School at Sisseton.— Building Dedicated.—M. N. Adams, Agent.—School Opened.— Mrs. Armor and Mrs. Morris.—“My Darling in God’s Garden.”— Visit to Fort Berthold.—Mandans, Rees, and Hidatsa.—Dr. W. Matthews’ Hidatsa Grammar.—Beliefs.—Missionary Interest in Berthold.—Down the Missouri.—Annual Meeting at Santee.— Normal School.—Dakotas Build a Church at Ascension.—Journey to the Ojibwas with E. P. Wheeler.—Leech Lake and Red Lake,— On the Gitche Gumme.—“The Stoneys.”—Visit to Odanah.— Hope for Ojibwas. The American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was to hold its annual meeting in the autumn of 1873 in the city of Minneapolis. That was almost the identical spot where our mission had been commenced, nearly forty years before. And it was comparatively near to the centre of our present work. These were reasons why we should make a special effort to bring the Dakota mission, on this occasion, prominently before this great Christian gathering. Our churches on the Sisseton reservation were only a little more than 200 miles away. Taking advantage of the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad, it would only be a three-days journey. Accordingly, I applied to my friend Gen. Geo. L. Becker of St. Paul, who was then president of the road, to send me half-fares for a dozen Dakota men. He generously responded, and sent me up a free pass down for that number.
- 77. This made itpossible for all the churches on the Sisseton reservation to be represented by pastors and elders. A. L. Riggs brought over a good delegation from the Santee, so that we had there seventeen of our most prominent men. The present missionaries and assistant missionaries of the Board, except Mr. and Mrs. Morris, were all there. Our brother John P. Williamson was engaged in church-building, and could not attend. But there were the Pond brothers and Dr. T. S. Williamson accepting with glad hearts the results of their labors commenced thirty-nine years before. And the presence of so large an Indian delegation added much to the popular interest of the occasion. So that the subject of Indian missions in general, and of the Dakota mission in particular, engaged the attention of this great meeting for about one-third of their time. Artemas Ehnamane, the pastor of Pilgrim Church at Santee, and Paul Mazakootemane, the hero of the outbreak of 1862, both made addresses before the Board, which were interpreted by A. L. Riggs. In the Dakota Word Carrier, we were at this time publishing a series of “Sketches of the Dakota Mission,” which we gathered into a pamphlet and distributed to the thousands of Christian friends gathered there. Number twelve of these sketches is mainly a contrast between the commencement and the present state of our work among the Dakotas, from which I make the following extract:— “THEN AND NOW. “In the first days of July, 1839, a severe battle was fought between the Dakotas and Ojibwas. The Ojibwas had visited Fort Snelling during the last days of June, expecting to receive some payment for land sold. In this they were disappointed. The evening before they started for their homes—a part going up the Mississippi, and a part by the St. Croix—two young men were observed to go to the soldiers’ burying-ground, near the fort, and cry. Their father had been killed some years before by the Dakotas, and was buried there. The next morning they
- 78. started for theirhomes; but these two young men, their people not knowing it, went out and hid themselves that night close by a path which wound around the shores of Lake Harriet. In the early morning following, a Dakota hunter walked along that path, followed by a boy. The man was shot down, and the boy escaped to tell the story. “During their stay in the neighborhood of Fort Snelling, the Ojibwas had smoked and eaten with the Dakotas. That scalped man now lying by Lake Harriet was an evidence of violated faith. The Dakotas were eager to take advantage of the affront. The cry was for vengeance; and before the sun had set, two parties were on the war-path. “The young man who had been killed was the son-in-law of Cloud-man, the chief of the Lake Calhoun village. Scarlet Bird was the brother-in-law of the chief. So Scarlet Bird was the leader of the war-party which came to where the city of Minneapolis is now built, and about the setting of the sun crossed over to the east side; and there, seating the warriors in a row on the sand, he distributed the beads and ribbons and other trinkets of the man who had been killed, and with them ‘prayed’ the whole party into committing the deeds of the next morning. The morning’s sun, as it arose, saw these same men smiting down the Ojibwas, just after they had left camp, in the region of Rum River. Scarlet Bird was among the slain on the Dakota side; and a son of his, whom he had goaded into the battle by calling him a woman, was left on the field. Many Ojibwa scalps were taken, and all through that autumn and into the following winter the scalp dance was danced nightly at every Dakota village on the Mississippi and Minnesota rivers, as far up as Lac-qui-parle. “That was the condition of things then. Between then and now there is a contrast. Then only a small government saw-mill stood where now stand mammoth mills, running hundreds of saws. Then only a soldiers’ little dwelling stood where now are the palaces of merchant princes. Then only the war-whoop of
- 79. the savage washeard where now, in this year of grace, 1873, a little more than a third of a century after, is heard the voice of praise and prayer in numerous Christian sanctuaries and a thousand Christian households. Then it was the gathering-place of the nude and painted war-party; now it is the gathering-place of the friends of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Then the dusky forms of the Dakotas flitted by in the gloaming, bent on deeds of blood; now the same race is here largely represented by pastors of native churches and teachers of the white man’s civilization and the religion of Christ. And the marvelous change that has passed over this country, converting it from the wild abode of savages into the beautiful land of Christian habitations, is only surpassed by the still more marvelous change that has been wrought upon those savages themselves. The greater part of the descendants of the Indians who once lived here are now in Christian families, and have been gathered into Christian churches, having their native pastors. Some, too, have gone beyond to the still wild portions of their own people, and are commencing there such a work as we commenced, nearly forty years ago, among their fathers here. “But the work is now commenced among the Teetons of the Missouri, under circumstances vastly different from those which surrounded us in its beginning here. Then, with an unwritten language, imperfectly understood and spoken stammeringly by foreigners, the Gospel was proclaimed to unwilling listeners. Now, with the perfect knowledge of the language learned in the wigwam, a comparatively large company of native men and women are engaged in publishing it. Many ears are still unwilling to listen, and the hearts of the wild Indians are only a very little opened to the good news; but the contrast between the past and present is very great.” While this meeting of the American Board was in progress, the ladies of the Woman’s Boards held a meeting, which was reported as full of interest. So many women publishers of the Word in all parts of
- 80. the world werepresent that the enthusiasm and Christ-spirit rose very high. Nina Foster Riggs, who had just arrived from Fort Sully, the center of Dakota heathendom, announced her wish for a female companion in labor there. Several young women present said, “I will go.” From these, Miss Lizzie Bishop of Northfield, Minn., was afterward selected. Her health was not vigorous, but she and her friends thought it might become more so in the Missouri River climate. She at once proceeded with T. L. Riggs and wife to Hope Station. There I met her for the first time in the first of the June following. She impressed me as a singularly pure-minded and devoted young woman. Two Teeton boys in the family belonged to her especial charge. She said she found the Lord’s Prayer in Dakota too difficult of comprehension for their use, and desired me to make something more simple. I sat down and wrote a child’s prayer, of which this is a translation:— “My Father, God, Have mercy on me; Now I will sleep; Watch over me: If I die before the morning, Take me to thyself. For thy Son Jesus’ sake, these I ask of thee.”
- 81. MARY AND I. MissBishop’s missionary work for the Teeton Sioux was soon over. But I will let Nina Foster Riggs tell the story: “After the meeting of the American Board in Minneapolis, in October, 1873, Miss Elizabeth Bishop of Northfield, Minn., entered the Dakota work. “Two years later, at the next western meeting of the society, and during the session of the Woman’s Board of Missions, her death was announced. Of the intervening twelve months twice told, it falls to my lot to speak, and I attempt the
- 82. task with mingledfeelings, for I know it is impossible to do justice to the beauty of Lizzie’s character. “Young, delicate, already suffering with a disease which made her to be over-fastidious in some things, sensitive to the discomforts of frontier life, and inexperienced in its ways of living, she came into the mission work. “These hindrances were met and more than overbalanced by her singleness of purpose, her even temper, her devotion to her chosen labor, and her unwavering trust in Jesus. “The first winter of her stay at Hope Station, on the bank of the Missouri River, opposite Fort Sully, was a winter of trial and of danger. Indians had threatened to burn the mission house. Hostile ones crowded about the place, the camps were noisy with singing and dancing in preparation for war-parties, and once a shot was fired into the house. “None of these things disturbed Lizzie. ‘I do not choose to be killed by the Indians,’ she said, ‘but if the Lord wills it so, it is all right.’ And she went on as usual with her housework and her sewing-school, and the care of the two Indian boys who were taken into the family in the spring. While she taught the sewing- class, several little girls, some six or eight, made dresses of linsey-woolsey for themselves; and then, under Miss Bishop’s supervision, combed their hair, bathed, and put on clean clothes. She also instructed several women in some branches of housework, and was always looking for the opportunity of doing good. “Very early in the winter she had a slight hemorrhage from the lungs, which was followed by others more severe at intervals through the summer. But she still kept up. “In the fall, after the removal to another mission station, her health gave way, and she was obliged to go to the fort to rest and recuperate. After her return she was able to resume only a part of her former work; but she carried on, with great enthusiasm, the morning school for children, and aided somewhat in the sewing-school.
- 83. “Although, as thespring advanced, her health failed more and more, yet her courage would not give way, and she never but once expressed the opinion that she should not recover. Her plan had been to spend this second summer in her own home, though sometimes she was almost ready to stay on and work for ‘my boys,’ as she called them. “Finally, she concluded to go to Minnesota for the summer, but made every arrangement to return to the mission in the fall. After some hesitation because of her delicate health, she decided to make the journey with our mission party overland, down the country. So she took the trip, enjoyed every day, and declared she felt better and slept better every night. “The party camped out over the Sabbath, and on Monday evening, the seventh day after leaving Fort Sully, arrived at the Yankton agency. Here, at the mission home of our friend J. P. Williamson, the welcome was so warm, and the companionship so pleasant, that Miss Bishop desired to spend a few days longer than she had intended. She wanted to visit the schools, and learn both here and at Santee agency something to help her when she should go back to teach the Indian children on the Upper Missouri. So she stayed behind, full of hope and zeal. But her friends parted from her with foreboding in their hearts. In a few days she was again attacked with her old trouble; she rallied so as to get to her home, and to be again with her mother and sister. But she sank rapidly, and, after some weeks of severe suffering, she entered into rest. “Writing of her, her sister said: ‘Her favorite motto was, “Simply to thy cross I cling.” She trusted in Christ because he has promised to save all who come to him. She enjoyed hearing us sing to the last such hymns as, “Jesus, Lover of My Soul,” “Nearer, my God, to Thee,” “My Faith Looks up to Thee,” “Father, Whate’er of Earthly Bliss,” “How Firm a Foundation,” and others.’ “Resting on Him who is able to save, she passed away. “The work she loved, and so conscientiously carried on, has fallen to other hands, but is not finished nor lost; and in the
- 84. homes she helpedto make happy she is missed, yet her memory is an abiding presence, cheering and encouraging. “‘And a book of remembrance was written before him for them that feared the Lord, and that thought upon his name. And they shall be mine, saith the Lord of Hosts, in that day when I make up my jewels.’[8]” [8] Mention should be made here of Rev. Samuel Ingham and his wife, who joined the missionary force at Santee immediately after the meeting of the Board at Minneapolis. Mr. Ingham was suffering at the time from what was considered a temporary malady, but which proved serious and ended his life Dec. 27, 1873. Mrs. Ingham continued in her work in the “Dakota Home,” the new school for girls. The commencement of the Manual Labor Boarding-School on the Sisseton reserve was an event which indicated progress. Agent M. N. Adams had received authority from the department to erect a suitable building. On the 4th of September, 1873, the foundation walls were so far completed that the corner-stone was laid with appropriate ceremonies. There was quite a gathering of the natives and white people on the reservation. After prayer in Dakota by Pastor Solomon, Mr. Adams made a speech, which was interpreted, setting forth the advantages that would accrue to this people from such a school as this building contemplated. He then announced that he had in his hands copies of the Bible in Dakota and English, and a Dakota hymn book, together with eight numbers of the Iapi Oaye, a copy of the St. Paul Press, and a Yankton paper, and also sundry documents, all of which he deposited in the place prepared for them. I added a few remarks, and then the corner-stone was laid and pronounced level. Speeches followed from Solomon, John B., and Daniel Renville, pastors; and from Robert Hopkins, Two Stars, and Gabriel Renville. They accepted this as the guarantee of progress in the new era on which they had entered.
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