HELPING PEOPLE'S

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

There have been lots of interesting discussions and topics floating around about new social media in the social scienes. What better way to share than to host some tweet chats! See below for the dates and the topic we will cover for each tweet chat. All times are London time. Tuesday 7th October, 2014 at 5pm: Representativeness of online samples Including: What are the geographical inequalities in contributions across different social media platforms? What approaches can we take to address this? How can we weight twitter data? How can we learn about demographics of people on social media, such as age, gender, employment? Monday 17th November at 5pm: Ready, set, research!: accessing funds and data Including: You have an idea for a study, how do you go about funding it? What funding streams are available? What are the regulations/restrictions of accessing different streams? How do we get our hands on big data sets from the likes of Google and Twitter? Tuesday 9th December at 5pm: The ch...

María Belén Conti is a student in the Social Media MA at the University of Westminster. As a journalist, I usually find myself in a difficult situation when it comes to social media: would it affect my job opportunities if I openly express my opinion of certain topics online as my friends do? Should I always be professional because if anything personal is filtered I will lose my credibility (major asset for a journalist)? Some may say that the best solution is to have two different profiles, one for personal and other professional proposes ( EFE, 2011 ; Restrepo, 2012 ). But again, the personal profile is there and the chance of information, opinions or photos filtering to audiences we don’t want to reach is still high. “You have one identity...The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly... Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity”, said Mark Z...