HELPING PEOPLE'S

Dhiraj Murthy is a Reader of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. Dhiraj Murthy’s current research explores social media, virtual organizations, and big data quantitative analysis. His work on social networking technologies in virtual breeding grounds was funded by the  S. National Science Foundation, Office of Cyber Infrastructure. Dhiraj  also has a book about Twitter, the first on the subject, that is published by Polity Press. His work on innovative digital research methods has been cited widely. For further informatio n,  visit his website . @dhirajmurthy The Facebook Psychology ‘experiment’ which manipulated the emotional content of nearly 700,000 users provides evidence that corporations need to have review procedures in terms of ethics that universities of been developing for some years surrounding social media research. In a university context, Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) are responsible for monito...

Carl Miller (@carljackmiller), Centre for the Analysis of Social Media, Demos The rise of social media has been important; that is no great revelation. It has wrought profound social change, buffeted our institutions and altered, for many of us, our way of life. New identities, dialects, cultures, affiliations and movements have all bloomed and spread across the digital world, and spilled out of it into mainstream public life. Back in 2012, we at Demos could see that social media was changing research too. The transfer of social activity onto digital spaces was ‘datafying’ social life. Huge new datasets were being routinely created that we saw as treasure troves of behavioural evidence: often very large, in real-time, rich, linked and unmediated. It was a massive new opportunity to learn about how people and society worked. Unlocking these datasets presented an enormous challenge. The sheer scale of social media data also meant that conventional social research methods couldn’t cope....