IR14 Pre-Conference Workshop Lightning Talk: Social Media Methods & Ethics

Methodological Challenges

IR14 Pre-Conference Workshop - Denver,CO

[email protected]@dpwoodford

Wednesday, 23 October 13

mailto:[email protected]

mailto:[email protected]

PLATFORMS

• Twitter: Open API, Limited on Volume, Real-Time unless paying for API; good data on user profiles.

• Facebook: Multiple levels of access; public pages easily accessible, historical data easy to obtain (unless deleted), but less precise (e.g. likes not timestamped unless page owner).

• Weibo? Vkontake? LinkedIn?

• Cost:Benefit analysis for developing infrastructure,


TWITTER

• Streaming API is limited to ~1% of total tweets per second & Firehose access is expensive.

• Large data sets are not easily malleable, or visually analyzed (e.g. with Tableau):– Our database of Twitter users is ~3.7TB, and growing.– A weeks worth of selected TV data (current US shows) in JSON

format is 750MB, and 600MB in TSV (selected fields). And millions of rows.

• Analyzing large data sets is slow, if it’s even possible => “Usable Data”


WHAT DOES 1% LOOK LIKE DURING SCANDAL?


RANDOM SAMPLING VS FULL SAMPLE ANALYSIS

Source: Tony Hirst (Open University UK)


FULL SAMPLE, REPEATED CAPTURE

Source: Bruns / Woodford [Mapping Online Publics]


ANALYSIS TOOLS: DATA ANALYTICS

• Historically @ CCI / Mapping Online Publics: .csv files, Gawk Scripts, Excel.

• Ideally: Custom Tools, R, Large Sample analysis.

• Reality: We’ve compromised on Tableau. A great option for easy data analysis, and reasonably large samples:– But still, large flat files => memory leaks (e.g. Accession charts

for Barack Obama).– Currently investigating database solutions, with mySQL as a

stop-gap.


ANALYSIS TOOLS: CONTENT ANALYSIS

• Lots of advanced tools, but sometimes they over-complicate things; simple visuals are good for communicating to your audience..

Source: Woodford / Prowd [Fan Cultures and Hatred in Big Brother 15: Race Rows, EliMsm & SporMng Tribalism -‐-‐ Forthcoming]


ANALYSIS TOOLS: WORDLE SOMETIMES WORKS



ANALYSIS TOOLS: WORDLE SOMETIMES WORKS



WHO’S THE AUDIENCE?

• Who you want to connect with is important in choosing methods and presentations.

• My commentary / analysis on Big Brother 15 (US) across my blog, MOP and SocialMedia@QUT was read many more times than ANY academic article I’ve ever written.

• And was picked up by industry..

• Who should we be writing for?


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• ARC Centre for Excellence in Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) - http://www.cci.edu.au & http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net

• Social Media Research Group -- http://socialmedia.qut.edu.au

• Queensland University of Technology


http://www.cci.edu.au

http://www.cci.edu.au

http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net




http://socialmedia.qut.edu.au




IR14 Pre-Conference Workshop Lightning Talk: Social Media Methods & Ethics

Education