HELPING PEOPLE'S

Luke Sloan is a Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods and Deputy Director of the Social Data Science Lab at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. Luke has worked on a range of projects investigating the use of Twitter data for understanding social phenomena covering topics such as election prediction, tracking (mis)information propagation during food scares and ‘crime-sensing’. His research focuses on the development of demographic proxies for Twitter data to further understand who uses the platform and increase the utility of such data for the social sciences. He sits as an expert member on the Social Media Analytics Review and Information Group (SMARIG) which brings together academics and government agencies.  @ DrLukeSloan The vast amount of data generated on social media platforms such as Twitter provide a rich seam of information for social scientist on opinions, attitudes, reactions, interactions, networks and behaviour that was hitherto unreachable throug...

Wasim Ahmed , from the University of Sheffield, is a PhD researcher in the Information School, and Research Associate at the Management School. Wasim is also a social media consultant, a part of Connected Action Consulting, and has advised security research teams, crisis communication intuitions, and companies ranked within the top 100 on the Fortune Global 500 list. Wasim often speaks at social media events, and is a regular contributor to the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) Impact blog.  @ was3210 This blog post is based on a conference with the same name which was delivered at the Introduction to Tools for Social Media Research conference. The slides for the talk can be found here . This blog post introduces and outlines some of the features of NodeXL . Network Overview, Discovery, and Exploration for Excel (NodeXL) is a graph visualization tool which allows the extraction of data from a number of popular social media platforms including Twitter, YouTube...

Dr Steven McDermott lectures on contemporary developments in media and communications with an emphasis on the social understanding and analysis of digital media; social media platforms and the public sphere; the politics and philosophy of digital media; and media and communications research methodologies at the London College of Communication, University of Arts, London.  @soci    s.mcdermott@lcc.arts.ac.uk My presentation given at the SRA and #NSMNSS allowed me to finally meet face-to-face with 7 expert speakers presenting tools for social media research. It was a day of learning for me. An all-day event that left me elated and keen to get on with my research in the knowledge that I would be able to call on the expertise of the others if needed - and of course my door is always open to the other speakers. I highly recommend taking part in similar future events to all. The talk was titled “ Critically Engaging with Social Media Research Tools ”; it was about using the to...

We have been posting a series of blogs written by University of Westminster Postgraduate students. They are all based on their research of social media, and come with a YouTube video as well. This is the last blog of the series - thank you to all of the students who contributed their work. Social Media users: The Digital Housewife? Valerie Kulchikhina ( @v_kulchikhina)  is a student at the University of Westminster for the Social Media Master's Degree program. She earned her Bachelor's Degree in journalism and advertising after graduating from the Lomonosov Moscow State University. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SssZatyTyM&feature=youtu.be New social media platforms are created every few years. For instance, after the success of MySpace in 2003 and Facebook in 2004, came the launch of Twitter in 2006.  In addition, there has been an emergence of image and video-based applications, such as Instagram and Snapchat (released in 2010 and 2011 respectively). ...

Thanks to everybody who attended our event at Twitter HQ on Tuesday looking at how social media data can be used to help us understand society. It was a great evening with interesting talks from Joseph Rice , Josh Smith , Callum Staff , Rob Procter , and Dr Aude Bicquelet . For those of you not able to attend, or follow along on Periscope, check out the links below to look at slides and video from the event Joe Rice, Twitter - What's possible when you know what the whole world is thinking? Watch video Callum Staff, Department for Education - #vom: predicting norovirus using Twitter Watch video Download slides Rob Procter, University of Warwick - Thinking practically about social data science Watch video Download slides Aude Bicquelet, NatCen - Using text mining to analyse YouTube comments on chronic pain Watch video Download slides Josh Smith, Demos - Listening to the digital commons Watch video Download slides Q & A with all speakers Watch video

We will be posting a series of blogs written by University of Westminster Postgraduate students. They are all based on their research of social media, and come with a YouTube video as well. We will be posting one a week for the next month, so keep your eyes peeled! Pandora’s box: The Conflict Between Privacy and Security Trenton Lee (@trentjlee) is a PhD Researcher at the Communications and Media Research Institute and the Westminster Institute for Advanced Studies at the University of Westminster. His research focuses on the intersection of critical political economy of the internet and identity theory.   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yp4K96nJptA The Guardian published an address to discuss the “uncomfortable truths” of the Apple vs. FBI court case in the United States where the FBI wanted Apple to aid in a terrorist investigation by developing a “back door” to “circumvent user-set security feature in any given iPhone” (Powles and Chaparro 2016). They argue that companies like ...

On Tuesday 8th November, NatCen Social Research will be hosting an event as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science looking at how, in an increasingly digital age, social media research offers new ways of understanding society's attitudes and behaviours. The event will run from 17.00 to 19.00, featuring presentations from researchers who have used social media for research in a range of settings including government and academia, followed by a panel discussion. Unfortunately, the event is fully booked, but if you'd like to follow along, the event will be streamed live on Periscope through the  @NatCen  Twitter account. We're also looking to take questions from the Twitter audience for the panel discussion. If you can't make it, we'll make links to the broadcast available. Confirmed speakers are: Joseph Rice, Twitter: What's possible when you know what the whole world is thinking about any topic at any time? Josh Smith, DEMOS: Listening to the Digital Com...