Two Information Science Department faculty members in the University of Arkansas at Little Rock’s College of Engineering and Information Technology and a Carleton University scholar have co-edited a recently published book.

Online Collective Action: Dynamics of the Crowd in Social Media stems from a National Science Foundation research grant directed by Drs. Nitin Agarwal and Rolf Wigand, along with Dr. Merlyna Lim, Canada research chair at Carleton University.

Published Aug. 2 by Springer, the book is the fourth in a regular series of texts on social networks.

The editors note in the book a recent surge in research devoted to online collective action, a relatively new and fast-moving phenomenon propelled by the use of rapidly developing technologies on the ground.

The book argues that contemporary collective actions, from the 2011 Egyptian Tahrir uprising to the 2013 Turkish protest in Gezi Park, cannot be separated from the uses of social media.

It addresses the gap in the current collective action literature exposed by the new information and communication technologies landscape by bringing together qualitative and quantitative studies from computational and social sciences.

By carefully selecting a number of qualitative and quantitative studies from computational and social sciences focusing on online collective actions, the new book seeks to promote a symbiotic and synergistic advancement of the multiple, interconnected disciplines.

The researchers’ work observing Saudi Arabian female activists who used social media platforms to protest against gender-biased laws and practices in that country helped them earn a Best Publication of 2012 Award at the International Conference on Information Systems in Milan, Italy, in December 2013.

The award recognized the article as the best among the nominations from each of the 36 worldwide information system journals each year by the Senior Scholars Consortium of the Association for Information Systems.

Agarwal is an associate professor and Wigand is the Maulden-Entergy Chair and Distinguished Professor in the UALR EIT Information Science Department.

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