HELPING PEOPLE'S

Dr Luke Sloan is a Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods, Deputy Director of Cardiff Q-Step and a member of the Collaborative Online Social Media Observatory (COSMOS: www.cosmosproject.net ). He is based in the School of Social Sciences at Cardiff University and his research focuses on the development of demographic proxies for Twitter data and understanding how social media data can augment traditional modes of social scientific analysis. @drlukesloan A perennial criticism of Twitter data is that it’s missing many of the variables that we find interesting as social scientists and, because of this, it will never be a viable source of data for social scientific analysis. We are anchored to the practices of survey methodology in which a question is asked and answered, thus we ensure that the researcher collects the relevant demographic information allowing us to compare ...

This is another blog from the UCL project  Why We Post  written by Juliano Spyer (@jasper). The project is researching the uses and consequences of social media around the globe. The online course has now finished, but will be restarted in the coming months. There are also seven more books to be launched, that can be downloaded for free via Open Access. Follow their twitter @UCLWhyWePost for more information and check out their website to learn about the different discoveries they have made. The last four months of 2015 were tough. I was locking myself in a claustrophobic student carrel every day, spending 9 hours staring at a computer screen but not being able to finish the final draft of my book. I began having trouble sleeping and pictured a clock ticking everywhere I went. But the source of this anxiety – as I realized later – was a prolonged and unconscious struggle to say something about my research while the evidence was pointing the other way. I wanted...