Computational Study on Organised Cyberbullying in Online Communities

The major tasks of the proposed collaboration program include: 1) the scoping study of process analytics of organised cyberbullying behaviours in OCs; 2) training ESRs; and 3) organizing knowledge exchange events.

Scoping Study. The task aims at conducting scoping study for applying computational process analytics for developing process view of cyberbullying behaviours in online communities. An online community archive data from a Korean celebrity online community, which the collaboration team owns, will be used for the study. The deliverable of this task is D1, a grant proposal entitled "A Study on Organised Cyberbullying in Online Communities" and to be delivered in month 18. There are 5 main sub-tasks (STs) to deliver a grant proposal. ST 1 conducts a systematic literature review on cyberbullying in Internet. The scientific databases in Information Systems, Organisational Behaviour, Computer Science, Psychology, and Healthcare Management will be searched to identify related studies. The outcome is the related studies and the confirmation of the scientific novelty of the proposed research. ST 2 is to design the framework to address three research questions based on critical realism. A computational social science framework based on critical realism will be used as the basic framework. In the framework, a text mining tool will be integrated to identify articles with regards to organised cyberbullying. The selected articles will be further analysed for coding involved actors, their positions, and their networks. A sequence analytics tool like TraMiner (http://traminer.unige.ch/) will be used for identifying patterns of interactions among community members. The framework is expected to provide static (network model) and dynamic (evolution of patterns) view of organised cyberbullying behaviours. In ST 3, the framework will be applied to the OC archive data to evaluate the usability of the framework. Also, the team will develop guidelines to develop process theories based on the computational analysis results using the framework. ST 4 will analyse scientific and practical impact of the proposed framework. Target industry and stakeholders who will be beneficiary of the framework will be identified and the scenarios of the use of framework to generate values for them will be developed. Finally, ST 5 will summarise the findings of each STs as a grant proposal for the larger scale study to generalise the usability of the framework in different OCs.

Training of ESRs. This task consists of activities to train ESRs including the assessment of the training needs of individual ESR, designing training sessions, delivery of training contents, and establishing feedback loops to ensure the training needs are met at the end of the course. The training sessions will be delivered through online and on-site events. On-site training sessions will be delivered at four workshops organized at UBRUN (month 4, 12) and YSU (month 8, 16).

Knowledge Exchange Seminars. This task includes activities to organise monthly online seminars between UBRU and YSU teams. UBRUN and YSU staff members will present their research outcomes in relation with Scoping Study. Also, external experts working on the cyberbullying in OCs as well as methods applied in the study will be invited for integrating their knowledge into the scoping study outcomes.