HELPING PEOPLE'S

NSMNSS knowledge exchange event: Using social media for academic work - opportunities and challenges Following on from the successful launch of our book of blogs on social media research , we will be holding a new knowledge exchange event on January 12th at NatCen in central London with two of the blog authors sharing their experiences of using social media for research. We're delighted to be joined by Dr Deborah Lupton , Centenary Research Professor at the University of Canberra, who is making a flying visit to the UK and also by Dr Luke Sloan from the COSMOS team at Cardiff University. As well as the two main presentations there will be an opportunity for networking, lunch and the chance for you to share your research experiences in an open space forum where you can ask for advice and input on challenges or dilemmas you may be facing with your own research projects. A draft agenda for the event is below; places are free but limited to 25 people so ...

Do you have a burning question about social sciences and social media? Want to learn something specific from our cross-country, cross-discipline members? Now is your chance! We are thinking ahead about the topics of our monthly tweetchats for 2015. Let us know in the comments what you want to discuss and learn more about and we will expand on the idea by coming up with questions to pose to the network to discuss. Looking forward to your thoughts!

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...

Brian Head is a research methodologist at RTI International. This post first appeared on SurveyPost on 20 May, 2014. You can follow Brian on Twitter @BrianFHead . Survey researchers have become interested in big data because it offers potential solutions to problems we’re experiencing with traditional methods. Much of the focus so far has been on social media (e.g., Tweets), but sensors (wearable tech) and the internet of things (IoT) are producing an increasingly rich, complex, and massive source of data. These new data sources could lead to an important change in how individuals see the data collected about them, and thus have ramifications for those interested in gathering and analyzing those data. Who compiles data? Quantitative data about people have been gathered for millennia. But with technological advances and identification of new purposes for it, the past 100 years have seen significant increases in the amount of data produced and collected—e.g., data on consume...

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. Yesterday the NSMNSS network published its first ebook, a collection of over fifty blogs penned by researchers from around the world who are using social media in their social research. To the best of our knowledge this is the first book of blogs in the social sciences.   It draws on the insights of experienced and well-known commentators on social media research through to the thoughts of researchers new to the field. Why did we choose to publish a book of blogs rather than a textbook or peer-reviewed article?   In my view there is space in the academic publishing world for peer reviewed works and self-published books. We chose to publish a book of blogs rather than a traditional academic tome because we wanted to create something quickly which reflected the concerns and voices of our members. Creating a di...