HELPING PEOPLE'S

Missed out? Here’s the twitter feed from #NSMNSS chat on how to pick a social media platform in research See below for the twitter feed from our first tweetchat of 2015 (Tues 3rd Feb) all about how to pick a social media platform in research.   Scroll to the bottom and work your way up to follow the conversation in the order it occurred.    A summary of the 7 questions posed to those taking part is included below: Q1: What is a social media platform? #NSMNSS Q2: Which social media platforms are you using, or would like to use, in research? #NSMNSS Q3: Which platforms are you using to get data? #NSMNSS Q4: Do certain platforms lend themselves more to quantitative or qualitative approaches? 'Big data', 'small data'? #NSMNSS Q5: (from @jess1ecat) What difference is there in researching public data like Twitter stream cf. to group wikis & forums? #NSMNSS Q6: How do you handle data protection & ethical issues on different platforms? #NSMNSS Q7 How do we attend t...

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...

In 2011 then Census Director Robert Groves  wrote  on the Census Director’s Blog about the burgeoning volume of “organic data”—data that, as opposed to “designed data,” have no meaning until they are used (surveys are a primary example of the latter). He noted that finding ways to combine these two types of data to increase the “information-to-data ratio” was a challenge, but also represented the future of surveys. Using terms identified as “big data descriptors” in Groves’ piece, as well as a few other terms I think qualify, I put together the graph below to show the number of AAPOR presentation titles between 2010 and 2013 that contain a big data descriptor. 1,2 One take away is the increased interest researchers have shown in big data over the past few years. An equally important lesson is that almost all of the attention big data has received from AAPOR members—at least measured by the number of presentations they’ve done—has been on social networking sites (SNS). I f...

Greetings from Boise, Idaho, USA . It is my honor and pleasure to join the NSMNSS web team as an contributing expert . In this post I will briefly describe my background as it pertains to this group and the dynamic arena of social media research. I currently work as an Associate Professor and Associate Department Chair in the Educational Technology Program (EDTECH) at Boise State University . The majority of our EDTECH program is graduate level and completely online. I have been teaching online with this program for over a decade. Prior to my work in higher education I was a middle-school science teacher. I have been enamored with video in education ever since those early years teaching science to teens. Video seemed like the best way to introduce these rural Idaho teens to active volcanoes, deep sea life, or experts on topics we were studying. Of course, back then we relied on the now antiquated VCR technology to play video in the classroom. I never knew if it was going to work or no...