@somelabresearchSoMe LabSocial Media Lab @ UW 1

This research was made possible by NSF Award #1243170INSPIRE: Tools, Models, and Innovation Platforms for Research on Social Media

The SoMe Lab Team

@somelabresearchSoMe LabSocial Media Lab @ UW 2

Social Media ResearchObjectives for Today’s Workshop

• Open the “black box” of social media research• Design• Method• Procedures

• Describe our experiences and choices; outline what (we think) we’ve learned

• Walk through some examples; use SoMe Tools (alpha version)

• Discuss next steps

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Let’s do some social media research!

Well, some mock research anyhow.

Preparing to Collect Data

Collection and Processing

Visualizations and Analytics

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Preparing to Collect Data

Ethical implications for social media researchers

Selecting a topic and platform

Keyterm selection

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Ethics: Beyond the IRB

Necessary, but not necessarily sufficient

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The digital notion of “public”

Folks do things in publicthat they’d rather not see

made more public.

…and the Internet is forever

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I can see my house from here!

I tweet every day whenI get home from school!

I also tweet during your 3:30pm T/Th lecture!

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Protecting subjectsfrom risk

Secure your data.

Don’t use e-mail or platforms attached to your

e-mail for data.

Have a legal plan.

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What other ethical obligations dowe have in social media research?

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Sorry, no #ows today.

We’ll need another topic.

Let’s talk about selecting one.

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Selecting a topic

Largely an issue of time

Time may encourage aninductive or deductive

approach

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Platform selection

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The dreaded Terms of Service

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So, about that topic….

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Selecting key terms

Key terms are strings, that when matched, tell the Twitter API to give you the matching tweet

Extremely generous (to a fault):Matches @-mentions, text within the tweet,

within a URL within the tweet,

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And don’t forget about rate-limiting

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Hashtags change.

#occupyoakland#oo

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You can’t collect them all.

@somelabresearchSoMe LabSocial Media Lab @ UW

Now you try!

What are the public’s interactions on Twitter

surrounding the fiscal cliff?

Focus on two questions:How do you go about the process of finding keywords?

Which keywords did you select?

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Voila! #my2k

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Next Steps

• SoMe Lab Efforts: our plans– Toolkit: comments and suggestions welcomed– Using it: follow us on the website or ask to be on

our on our mailing list for latest developments• How to assure on-going learning among social

media researchers [Work toward shared frameworks for reporting work? A community wiki or portal? HICSS mini-track? …]