HELPING PEOPLE'S

Curtis Jessop is a Senior Researcher at NatCen Social Research where he works on longitudinal surveys and is the Network Lead for the NSMNSS network Next year, I, along with Luke Sloan and Tarek Al Baghal , will be running an experiment on the Understanding Society Innovation Panel to look at the feasibilities and practicalities of linking Twitter and survey data in a longitudinal context, and how they can be combined to improve the quality of both. We will be specifically focussing on how survey data can be enhanced using social media data (for example by creating new measures, validating survey estimates or improving non-response adjustments) and how social media data can be validated using survey data. However, we are aware that such a dataset has a greater potential than this, so we are also thinking about the ethics and practicalities that may be involved in making this dataset available more widely. This will no doubt be tricky – as far as we are aware it is unprecedented to a...

Last Monday (11 th May) the SRA, along with NSMNSS, hosted a seminar looking at ethics and informed consent in the context of online research. As long-standing network members will know, the ethical challenges of conducting research has been something that has consistently cropped up as a core concern for social scientists looking to use social media in their research, and this event demonstrated that this continued to be the case. Matt Williams from the Social Data Science Lab kicked off proceedings with a discussion of his experiences of ethics in social media research based on his work with COSMOS , a platform for accessing Twitter data. Matt focussed on some of the issues relating to publishing research based on Twitter data, and how Twitter’s policies relating to the publication of Tweets (showing names, @usernames, and unmodified Tweet text) can clash with researchers requirements of anonymity and protecting participants from harm, before outlining their approach to ‘risk ass...

Last year we had a number of successful twitter chats on topics from generating representative online datasets to the changing roles of social media researchers in an increasingly mediated world. Based on topics arising from our previous discussions, and current issues and emerging trends in online research, we have a number of topics for upcoming #NSMNSS twitter chats this year (see below). However, we really want our chats to be led by you - which topic we should discuss first?   Have a read and cast your votes here !   We will announce the winning topic on Twitter.   The first chat is on Tuesday 3 rd February at 5pm (UK time. You can time check for your location here ). To blog or not to blog? What a question! Why are we blogging (or not)? What are the opportunities and challenges of blogging for our research? What are the relationships between blogging and traditional forms of publishing? How can we use quantitative metrics to know more about our audiences and what ...

See below for the twitter feed from our tweetchat on 9th December 2014 all about the changing role of researchers involved in online and social media research. Scroll to the bottom and work your way up to follow the conversation in the order it occured. A summary of the 5 questions posed to those taking part is included below: Q1: How is social media impacting upon you as a researcher? E.g. identity, work/life balance, ethics Q2: How is social media changing our identities as researchers? Q3 from @ einterview : How does insider-outsider position influence your role, identity,access or objectivity? Q4 from @ newbiephd : What does it mean to be ‘virtually ethical’? Q5: What are the key issues around social media for researchers going forward? Q6: What topics shall we chat about on # NSMNSS in the new year? Tweets about #nsmnss since:2014-12-09 until:2014-12-10

Patrick Readshaw is a Media and Cultural Studies Doctoral Candidate at Canterbury Christ Church University. Patrick is interested in social media as an alternative and empowering source of information on current events, free from the constraints of other agenda-setting media forms. You can contact Patrick by email on p.j.readshaw68@canterbury.ac.uk     When I was asked to write a blog for NSMNSS, I was certainly excited and being my first post of this kind I was suitably anxious about the prospect. However, my ongoing thesis has never ceased to provide interesting discussions with individuals in linked or parallel fields relating to social media. The main caveat in these discussions is that I often have to try not to over complicate things. With that in mind and my ham-fisted introduction out of the way I want to take some time to break down the value of so called “new media systems” like Twitter and the how I personally go about dealing with the data I collect.  Sinc...

Ashley Richards is a survey methodologist at RTI International. This post first appeared on SurveyPost on 29, July 2014.   Last fall at MAPOR  , Joe Murphy presented the findings of a fun study he did with our colleague, Justin Landwehr, and me. We asked survey respondents if we could look at their recent Tweets and combine them with their survey data. We took a subset of those respondents and masked their responses on six categorical variables. We then had three human coders and a machine algorithm try to predict the masked responses by reviewing the respondents’ Tweets and guessing how they would have responded on the survey. The coders looked for any clues in the Tweets, while the algorithm used a subset of Tweets and survey responses to find patterns in the way words were used. We found that both the humans and machine were better than random in predicting values of most of the variables. We recently took this research a step further and compared the accuracy of ...

Kandy Woodfield is the Learning and Enterprise Director at NatCen Social Research, and the co-founder of the NSMNSS network. You can reach Kandy on Twitter @jess1ecat. It started with a tweet, a blog post and a nervous laugh. Three months later I found  myself looking at a book of blogs. How did that happen?! Being involved in the NSMNSS network since its beginning has been an ongoing delight for me. It's full of researchers who aren't afraid to push the boundaries, question established thinking and break down a few silos. When I began my social research career, mobile phones were suitcase-sized and collecting your data meant lugging a tape recorder and tapes around with you. That world is gone, the smartphone most of us carry in our pockets now replaces most of the researcher's kitbag, and one single device is our street atlas, translator, digital recorder, video camera and so much more. Our research world today is a different place from 20 years ago, social media are comm...

Sebastian Stevens is an Associate Lecturer and Research Assistant at Plymouth University. He teaches research methods to social science students specialising in quantitative methods. He is on twitter @sebstevens99 and has a blog site at www.everydaysocialresearch.com.  A key benefit that social media can bring to social science research is through impact and engagement. Demonstrating how a research project will achieve impact and engage the public is a key requirement of most social science research bids today, with many funders looking for more than the traditional conference and journal article as being sufficient. Funders today want to see not only how your research will contribute to the current body of knowledge, but also how your research could impact other areas of academia as well as providing public engagement and economic and societal wide benefits. To promote your research to the widest possible audience, it is often necessary to use a number of Social Medi...

This post by Ernesto Priego was originally published here . We're delighted to share it as it touches on many issues network members have been discussing, so thanks to Ernesto for allowing us to repost. Twitter ecosystem quadrant, via blog.twitter.com This is just a quick snippet to jot down some ideas as some kind of follow-up to my blog post on the Ethics of researching Twitter datasets republished today [28 May 2014] by the LSE Impact blog. If you have ever tried to keep up with Twitter you will know how hard it is. Tweets are like butterflies– one can only really look at them for long if one pins them down out of their natural environment. The reason why we have access to Twitter in any form is because of Twitter’s API , which stands for “Application Programming Interface”. As Twitter explains it , “An API is a defined way for a program to accomplish a task, usually by retrieving or modifying data. In Twitter’s case, we provide an API method for just about every feature ...

By Jamileh Kadivar, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster. Watch the video here  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKeMTkqYF9I The video I produced is an introduction to Tweets and The Streets: Social Media And Contemporary Activism, a must read and a great book with lots of interesting insights and a strong research foundations. The book was written by Paolo Gerbaudo and published by Pluto Press in 2012. The video includes two interviews. In the beginning, I present the main arguments of the book and introduce the author as an academic, a journalist and also an activist; then, you can watch the interviewees' replies to my questions. Finally, I present my own conclusion. The first interview was conducted with Paolo Gerbaudo on March 2nd, 2014, by Skype. Dr. Paolo Gerbaudo, a lecturer in Digital Culture and Society at King’s College London, answers questions about the key terms in his book, such as 'choreography of assembly' and 'choreogr...

By Barrie Schooling, student in the MA in Social Media at the University of Westminster Watch the video interview here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3u4CyVStk4 Google ‘Twitter book review’ and you’ll get reviews of 1,000 page tomes reduced to 140 characters, for example “ The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Beautiful and thought provoking novel of love, obsession, lust and oppression". This sort of activity, indeed every sort of activity on Twitter from the profound to the banal are the subject of a book called ‘Twitter: Social Communication in the Twitter Age’ by Dhiraj Murthy. Having recently written a review of the book I arranged to interview Dhiraj in his Goldsmiths lab and chat to him a bit more about his work and to ask questions that might help to me critically review his work. In ‘Twitter. Social communication in the Twitter age’ Dhiraj Murthy discusses the platform as it gives ‘ordinary’ people a medium to publish ‘user-generated “news/updates”, Twitter is a ‘soci...

Keurkoon Phoomwittaya is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster. They travelled with me to many places in my hometown in Thailand and flew across the sky to England. I take them on every journey that I go. Since I was young, I used to write stories about travelling experiences in my secret notebook. I kept it in my backpack. Now I have a smart phone as another object which I use for capturing moments and telling my stories via social media platforms. Turkle says that "We think with the objects we love; we love the objects we think with" (2007:5). The things that we take around us provoke emotions toward moments that we relate to. Not only do we use mobile phones to share life moments online, we also observe stories that our friends tell. We often imagine along with their stories, but we do not sense exactly the same as how they feel. Indeed, we know best our own embodied experience of being in a place, and why we choose to tell about it. The import...

Akin Olaniyan is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster.   Making sense of the obvious tension between online visibility and privacy is never going to be a straightforward thing for me. Having worked as a reporter and a corporate communication specialist for more than two decades, I have some sense of dealing with public scrutiny of my work. Until now, social media was just for me another platform.  If you know newspapers, I used to think, you shouldn’t have problems functioning in the new environment that digital convergence has created. Or so I thought. Just weeks after arriving for the Social Media MA at Westminster University , I have come to agree with danah boyd that being visible through social media can both complicate and enrich our lives (boyd, 2012). Social media networking sites like Facebook and Twitter offer new ways of engagement that have collapsed the walls of privacy, sometimes with terrible consequences. Henry Jenkins captures thi...

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By Amy Aisha Brown, PhD Blogger After reading Dr Janet Salmons’s last post ( Defining our terms: What is “social media”? ), I was inspired to think about what the term means to me but coming up with a definition is not that easy. Is social media defining platforms, the affordances of platforms, something else? Is it the online factor? Because it is participatory? How far does the label extend? I am excited about the #NSMNSS tweetchat we are going to have on 5 December (details here ) where we can discuss some of these questions and think about what social media means to us as a group, but after failing to find a personal definition for this potentially all-encompassing term, I thought a better approach might be for me to think about what social media means or brings to my doctoral research . On a basic level I could say, “social media is data”. That is, I use Twitter as my way into investigating how the English language in Japan is talked about. This is not a common approach in studies...