Public mass shootings tend to capture the public's attention and receive substantial coverage in both traditional media and online social networks (OSNs) and have become a salient topic in them. Motivated by this, the overarching objective of this paper is to advance our understanding of how the public responds to mass shooting events in such media outlets. Specifically, it aims to examine whether distinct information seeking patterns emerge over time and space, and whether associations between public mass shooting events emerge in online activities and discourse. Towards this objective, we study a sequence of five public mass shooting events that have occurred in the United States between October 2017 and May 2018 across three major dimensions: the public's online information seeking activities, the media coverage, and the discourse that emerges in a prominent OSN. To capture these dimensions, respectively, data was collected and analyzed from Google Trends, LexisNexis, Wikipedia Page views, and Twitter. The results of our analysis suggest that distinct temporal patterns emerge in the public's information seeking activities across different platforms, and that associations between an event and its preceding events emerge both in the media coverage and in OSNs.

中文翻译：

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对大规模射击事件的反应

大众枪击往往会引起公众的注意，并在传统媒体和在线社交网络（OSN）中获得大量报道，并已成为其中的一个突出主题。出于此目的，本文的首要目标是加深我们对公众如何应对此类媒体上的大规模枪击事件的理解。具体而言，其目的是检查是否随时间和空间出现了不同的信息搜索模式，以及在线活动和话语中是否出现了公共大规模枪击事件之间的关联。为了实现这一目标，我们研究了2017年10月至2018年5月在美国发生的五次公众大规模枪击事件，涉及三个主要方面：公众在线信息搜索活动，媒体报道，以及在著名的OSN中出现的话语。为了分别捕获这些维度，从Google趋势，LexisNexis，Wikipedia页面视图和Twitter收集并分析了数据。我们的分析结果表明，跨平台的公众信息搜索活动中出现了截然不同的时间模式，事件及其先前事件之间的关联出现在媒体报道和OSN中。