Our online behaviour is far from virtual–it extends our offline lives. Much social media research has identified the positive opportunities of using social media; for example, how people use social media to form support groups online, participate in political uprising, raise money for charities, extend teaching and learning outside the classroom, etc. However, mirroring offline experiences, we have also seen social media being used to spread propaganda and misinformation, recruit terrorists, live stream criminal activities, reinforce echo chambers by politicians, and perpetuate hate and oppression (such as racist, sexist, homophobic, and anti-Semitic behaviour).
Workshop Facilitators
Dr. Luke Sloan, Cardiff University (UK)
Dr. Anabel Quan-Haase, Western University (Canada)
Dr. Dhiraj Murthy, University of Texas at Austin (USA)
Dr. Frauke Zeller, Ryerson University (Canada)
Workshop Details
Objectives:
1) To explore the opportunities afforded through linking social media with other forms of data
2) To evaluate the benefits of linking data against ethical concerns
3) To identify hurdles around informed consent for data linkage
4) To engage participants in discussions
Presenters will lead a series of short sessions around their specialist topic. Each presenter will begin with a maximum 10 min talk identifying the key issues and considerations involved in their area of research. They will then set a group task for participants to engage in, involving discussions in groups of around 8 and feeding back via plenary.
Presenters will talk to the following topics:
SLOAN will make the case for linking data (specifically Twitter and social surveys). Drawing on the augmentation thesis (Edwards et al. 2013), he will argue that social media does not replace existing avenues of social research, rather that it augments our understanding through providing an alternative lens through which to view the social world. He will draw upon research which has attempted to address the lack of demographic information available regarding Twitter users (Sloan et al. 2013, Sloan et al. 2015, Sloan and Morgan 2015) and make the case for data linkage to further increase the utility of the data. In particular he will discuss recent studies that have requested permission to link data including British Social Attitudes 2015 and the Understanding Society Innovation Panel 2017 and what opportunities these afford us.
Group Activity: Group Work - generation of research questions that can only be answered with linked data.
QUAN- HAASE will examine novel and innovative means of linking data from multiple sources that takes into account ethical debates in the field of social media research. Linking data is considered the new frontier of social media scholarship, as it provides many advantages over decontextualized and flat data (Quan-Haase and Sloan, 2017). Linking data is no easy task, and several attempts have demonstrated the challenges— technical and ethical—over bridging various data sources. In this workshop section, a novel and innovative approach to data linking will be discussed that relies on combining data from interviews with social media data. By specifically obtaining consent from participants prior to data linking, the accuracy of the data can be verified and ethical concerns addressed. We demonstrate both the strengths and limitations of the approach.
Group Activity: Group Work – gaining informed consent for social media data linkage
MURTHY will address questions of data linkage in areas of human coding. Many types of data linkage are premised on metadata. However, many types of content do not have ready metadata for the types of things that we may like to study. Specifically, methods such as text mining and topic modeling often times are quite literal. This is further problematized with visual social media data (when the machine has much more difficulty reading what exactly an image is trying to convey). In this workshop section, Murthy makes the case for methods of human coding that enable us to understand social media data well and produce data linkages that take into account ethical concerns. Using his own projects where Instagram images and tweets were coded, Murthy introduces methods that can be implemented in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed social media research settings.
Group Activity: Discussion - what can be linked?
ZELLER will discuss her approach to linking data in method-mix study designs as a means to first of all combine quantitative and qualitative methods and second of all to overcome certain deficits in social media data, such as lack of demographic information and/or means to verify information. She will showcase a mixed-methods study on analysing Facebook images and image captions using quantitative corpus linguistics and qualitative image analysis. She will discuss ethical implications using Facebook perse, but also issues such as data discrimination and inclusion when it comes to image analyses in social media.
Group Activity: Discussion - what does your profile say about you?
Workshop participants can expect to have learnt:
Luke Sloan is a Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods and Deputy Director of the Social Data Science Lab at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. Luke has worked on a range of projects investigating the use of Twitter data for understanding social phenomena covering topics such as election prediction, tracking (mis)information propagation during food scares and ‘crime-sensing’. His research focuses on the development of demographic proxies for Twitter data to further understand who uses the platform and increase the utility of such data for the social sciences. He sits as an expert member on the Social Media Analytics Review and Information Group (SMARIG) which brings together academics and government agencies. He is currently involved with three large UK-based social survey studies that are exploring potential linkage between Twitter and survey data – the Welsh Election Study, British Social Attitudes 2015 and the Understanding Society Innovation Panel 2017.
Anabel Quan-Haase is an Associate Professor and holds a joint appointment at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies and the Department of Sociology, the University of Western Ontario. She is the director of the SocioDigital Lab and her research interests focus on how people integrate social media into their everyday lives and work settings. Her particular focus is on user engagement and the role of social context in how individuals use and make sense of messages and interactions on social media. Dr. Quan-Haase is the author of Technology and Society (2016, 2nd ed. with Oxford University Press) and co-editor with Luke Sloan of the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (2017 with Sage). She is the past president of the Canadian Association for Information Science and a past Council Member and Secretary of the CITAMS section of the American Sociological Association.
Dhiraj Murthy is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Sociology at the University of Texas Austin. He was previously Reader of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research explores social media, digital research methods, race/ethnicity, qualitative/mixed methods, big data quantitative analysis, and virtual organizations. Dhiraj has authored over 40 articles, book chapters, and papers and a book about Twitter, the first on the subject (published by Polity Press, 2013). He was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of CyberInfrastructure for pioneering work on social networking technologies in virtual organization breeding grounds, which resulted in two edited journal issues and the Collaborative Organizations & Social Media conference. Dhiraj’s work also uniquely explores the potential role of social technologies in diversity and community inclusion. He previously co-directed The Centre for Creative & Social Technologies at Goldsmiths and founded the Social Network Innovation Lab at Bowdoin College. He is chair of Social Media, Activism, and Organisations (#SMAO15) and a co-chair of Social Media & Society 2016.
Frauke Zeller is Associate Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Frauke works with social media data and digital communication focusing on the development of innovative mixed-methods approaches. She has also published in the field of social sciences and big data analyses, and co-edited a book on method innovations in European audience studies. Besides analysing social media data, Frauke researches other digital communication environments, such as virtual worlds and Human-Robot Interaction.
References
Edwards, A., Housley, W., Williams, M., Sloan, L., & Williams, M. (2013). Digital social research, social media and the sociological imagination: surrogacy, augmentation and re-orientation. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 16(3), 245-260. doi: 10.1080/13645579.2013.774185
Quan-Haase, A. & Sloan, L. (forthcoming 2017). Introduction to the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods: Goals, Challenges and Innovations. In L. Sloan & A. Quan- Haase (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods. London: SAGE.
Sloan, L., Morgan, J., Housley, W., Williams, M., Edwards, A., Burnap, P., & Rana, O. (2013). Knowing the Tweeters: Deriving Sociologically Relevant Demographics from Twitter. Sociological Research Online, 18
...
Barry Wellman, FRSC is a Canadian-American sociologist and is the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network. His areas of research are community sociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest is in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to networked individualism. He has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Wellman was a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year stint as S.D. Clark Professor.
Workshop Facilitator
Dr. Stu Shulman, Texifter (USA)
Workshop Details
Participate in this workshop to learn how to build custom machine classifiers for sifting social media data. The topics covered include how to:
DiscoverText is designed specifically for collecting and cleaning up messy Twitter data streams. Use basic research measurement tools to improve human and machine performance classifying Twitter data over time. The workshop covers how to reach and substantiate inferences using a theoretical and applied model informed by a decade of interdisciplinary, National Science Foundation-funded research into the text classification problem.
Participants will learn how to apply “CoderRank” in machine-learning. Just as Google said not all web pages are created equal, links on some pages rank higher than others, Dr. Shulman argues not all human coders are created equal; the accuracy of observations by some coders on any task invariably rank higher than others. The major idea of the workshop is that when training machines for text analysis, greater reliance should be placed on the input of those humans most likely to create a valid observation. Texifter proposed a unique way to recursively validate, measure, and rank humans on trust and knowledge vectors, and called it CoderRank.
Instructor’s Bio
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman is founder & CEO of Texifter. He was a Research Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the founding Director of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) at the University of Pittsburgh and at UMass Amherst. Dr. Shulman is Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, the official journal of Information Technology & Politics section of the American Political Science Association.
Workshop Facilitator
Dr. Jeffrey Boase, Associate Professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto (Canada)
Workshop Details
The first part of this workshop will review arguments and empirical findings regarding the role of mobile phone use in personal networks. The second part of the workshop will focus on discussing a newly developed multi-method approach to combining mobile calling and texting log data with traditional survey and interview techniques. This approach involves a system in which an online portal is used to customize the actions of a smartphone based data collection application. These actions include the collection of non-identifying calling and texting log data, on-screen survey questions, and dynamically drawing on log data to generate questions and stimuli for use during in-person interviews. After discussing this method we will have a hands-on exercise with the online portal and app. Respondents are encouraged to bring an Android phone to the workshop in order to fully participate in this exercise.
Bio
Dr. Jeffrey Boase is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the relationship between communication technology and personal networks. He is particularly interested in how emerging technologies such as smartphones and social media platforms may enable or hinder the transfer of information and support within personal networks. In recent years he has incorporated digital trace data into his project designs, merging it with more traditional survey and interview data.
THIS IS PART 2 OF THIS WORKSHOP, PLEASE MAKE SURE TO SIGN-UP FOR PART 1.
Workshop Facilitators
Dr. Luke Sloan, Cardiff University (UK)
Dr. Anabel Quan-Haase, Western University (Canada)
Dr. Dhiraj Murthy, University of Texas at Austin (USA)
Dr. Frauke Zeller, Ryerson University (Canada)
Workshop Details
Objectives:
1) To explore the opportunities afforded through linking social media with other forms of data
2) To evaluate the benefits of linking data against ethical concerns
3) To identify hurdles around informed consent for data linkage
4) To engage participants in discussions
Presenters will lead a series of short sessions around their specialist topic. Each presenter will begin with a maximum 10 min talk identifying the key issues and considerations involved in their area of research. They will then set a group task for participants to engage in, involving discussions in groups of around 8 and feeding back via plenary.
Presenters will talk to the following topics:
SLOAN will make the case for linking data (specifically Twitter and social surveys). Drawing on the augmentation thesis (Edwards et al. 2013), he will argue that social media does not replace existing avenues of social research, rather that it augments our understanding through providing an alternative lens through which to view the social world. He will draw upon research which has attempted to address the lack of demographic information available regarding Twitter users (Sloan et al. 2013, Sloan et al. 2015, Sloan and Morgan 2015) and make the case for data linkage to further increase the utility of the data. In particular he will discuss recent studies that have requested permission to link data including British Social Attitudes 2015 and the Understanding Society Innovation Panel 2017 and what opportunities these afford us.
Group Activity: Group Work - generation of research questions that can only be answered with linked data.
QUAN- HAASE will examine novel and innovative means of linking data from multiple sources that takes into account ethical debates in the field of social media research. Linking data is considered the new frontier of social media scholarship, as it provides many advantages over decontextualized and flat data (Quan-Haase and Sloan, 2017). Linking data is no easy task, and several attempts have demonstrated the challenges— technical and ethical—over bridging various data sources. In this workshop section, a novel and innovative approach to data linking will be discussed that relies on combining data from interviews with social media data. By specifically obtaining consent from participants prior to data linking, the accuracy of the data can be verified and ethical concerns addressed. We demonstrate both the strengths and limitations of the approach.
Group Activity: Group Work – gaining informed consent for social media data linkage
MURTHY will address questions of data linkage in areas of human coding. Many types of data linkage are premised on metadata. However, many types of content do not have ready metadata for the types of things that we may like to study. Specifically, methods such as text mining and topic modeling often times are quite literal. This is further problematized with visual social media data (when the machine has much more difficulty reading what exactly an image is trying to convey). In this workshop section, Murthy makes the case for methods of human coding that enable us to understand social media data well and produce data linkages that take into account ethical concerns. Using his own projects where Instagram images and tweets were coded, Murthy introduces methods that can be implemented in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed social media research settings.
Group Activity: Discussion - what can be linked?
ZELLER will discuss her approach to linking data in method-mix study designs as a means to first of all combine quantitative and qualitative methods and second of all to overcome certain deficits in social media data, such as lack of demographic information and/or means to verify information. She will showcase a mixed-methods study on analysing Facebook images and image captions using quantitative corpus linguistics and qualitative image analysis. She will discuss ethical implications using Facebook perse, but also issues such as data discrimination and inclusion when it comes to image analyses in social media.
Group Activity: Discussion - what does your profile say about you?
Workshop participants can expect to have learnt:
Luke Sloan is a Senior Lecturer in Quantitative Methods and Deputy Director of the Social Data Science Lab at the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, UK. Luke has worked on a range of projects investigating the use of Twitter data for understanding social phenomena covering topics such as election prediction, tracking (mis)information propagation during food scares and ‘crime-sensing’. His research focuses on the development of demographic proxies for Twitter data to further understand who uses the platform and increase the utility of such data for the social sciences. He sits as an expert member on the Social Media Analytics Review and Information Group (SMARIG) which brings together academics and government agencies. He is currently involved with three large UK-based social survey studies that are exploring potential linkage between Twitter and survey data – the Welsh Election Study, British Social Attitudes 2015 and the Understanding Society Innovation Panel 2017.
Anabel Quan-Haase is an Associate Professor and holds a joint appointment at the Faculty of Information and Media Studies and the Department of Sociology, the University of Western Ontario. She is the director of the SocioDigital Lab and her research interests focus on how people integrate social media into their everyday lives and work settings. Her particular focus is on user engagement and the role of social context in how individuals use and make sense of messages and interactions on social media. Dr. Quan-Haase is the author of Technology and Society (2016, 2nd ed. with Oxford University Press) and co-editor with Luke Sloan of the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods (2017 with Sage). She is the past president of the Canadian Association for Information Science and a past Council Member and Secretary of the CITAMS section of the American Sociological Association.
Dhiraj Murthy is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Sociology at the University of Texas Austin. He was previously Reader of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research explores social media, digital research methods, race/ethnicity, qualitative/mixed methods, big data quantitative analysis, and virtual organizations. Dhiraj has authored over 40 articles, book chapters, and papers and a book about Twitter, the first on the subject (published by Polity Press, 2013). He was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Office of CyberInfrastructure for pioneering work on social networking technologies in virtual organization breeding grounds, which resulted in two edited journal issues and the Collaborative Organizations & Social Media conference. Dhiraj’s work also uniquely explores the potential role of social technologies in diversity and community inclusion. He previously co-directed The Centre for Creative & Social Technologies at Goldsmiths and founded the Social Network Innovation Lab at Bowdoin College. He is chair of Social Media, Activism, and Organisations (#SMAO15) and a co-chair of Social Media & Society 2016.
Frauke Zeller is Associate Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. Frauke works with social media data and digital communication focusing on the development of innovative mixed-methods approaches. She has also published in the field of social sciences and big data analyses, and co-edited a book on method innovations in European audience studies. Besides analysing social media data, Frauke researches other digital communication environments, such as virtual worlds and Human-Robot Interaction.
References
Edwards, A., Housley, W., Williams, M., Sloan, L., & Williams, M. (2013). Digital social research, social media and the sociological imagination: surrogacy, augmentation and re-orientation. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 16(3), 245-260. doi: 10.1080/13645579.2013.774185
Quan-Haase, A. & Sloan, L. (forthcoming 2017). Introduction to the Handbook of Social Media Research Methods: Goals, Challenges and Innovations. In L. Sloan & A. Quan- Haase (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods. London: SAGE.
Sloan, L., Morgan, J., Housley, W., Williams, M., Edwards, A., Burnap, P., & Rana, O. (2013). Knowing the Tweeters: Deriving Sociologi
...
Barry Wellman, FRSC is a Canadian-American sociologist and is the co-director of the Toronto-based international NetLab Network. His areas of research are community sociology, the Internet, human-computer interaction and social structure, as manifested in social networks in communities and organizations. His overarching interest is in the paradigm shift from group-centered relations to networked individualism. He has written or co-authored more than 300 articles, chapters, reports and books. Wellman was a professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto for 46 years, from 1967 to 2013, including a five-year stint as S.D. Clark Professor.
THIS IS PART 2 OF THIS WORKSHOP, PLEASE MAKE SURE TO SIGN-UP FOR PART 1.
Workshop Facilitator
Dr. Stu Shulman, Texifter (USA)
Workshop Details
Participate in this workshop to learn how to build custom machine classifiers for sifting social media data. The topics covered include how to:
DiscoverText is designed specifically for collecting and cleaning up messy Twitter data streams. Use basic research measurement tools to improve human and machine performance classifying Twitter data over time. The workshop covers how to reach and substantiate inferences using a theoretical and applied model informed by a decade of interdisciplinary, National Science Foundation-funded research into the text classification problem.
Participants will learn how to apply “CoderRank” in machine-learning. Just as Google said not all web pages are created equal, links on some pages rank higher than others, Dr. Shulman argues not all human coders are created equal; the accuracy of observations by some coders on any task invariably rank higher than others. The major idea of the workshop is that when training machines for text analysis, greater reliance should be placed on the input of those humans most likely to create a valid observation. Texifter proposed a unique way to recursively validate, measure, and rank humans on trust and knowledge vectors, and called it CoderRank.
Instructor’s Bio
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman is founder & CEO of Texifter. He was a Research Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the founding Director of the Qualitative Data Analysis Program (QDAP) at the University of Pittsburgh and at UMass Amherst. Dr. Shulman is Editor Emeritus of the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, the official journal of Information Technology & Politics section of the American Political Science Association.
THIS IS PART 2 OF THIS WORKSHOP, PLEASE MAKE SURE TO SIGN-UP FOR PART 1.
Workshop Facilitator
Dr. Jeffrey Boase, Associate Professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto (Canada)
Workshop Details
The first part of this workshop will review arguments and empirical findings regarding the role of mobile phone use in personal networks. The second part of the workshop will focus on discussing a newly developed multi-method approach to combining mobile calling and texting log data with traditional survey and interview techniques. This approach involves a system in which an online portal is used to customize the actions of a smartphone based data collection application. These actions include the collection of non-identifying calling and texting log data, on-screen survey questions, and dynamically drawing on log data to generate questions and stimuli for use during in-person interviews. After discussing this method we will have a hands-on exercise with the online portal and app. Respondents are encouraged to bring an Android phone to the workshop in order to fully participate in this exercise.
Bio
Dr. Jeffrey Boase is an Associate Professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information and Technology and the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the relationship between communication technology and personal networks. He is particularly interested in how emerging technologies such as smartphones and social media platforms may enable or hinder the transfer of information and support within personal networks. In recent years he has incorporated digital trace data into his project designs, merging it with more traditional survey and interview data.
The workshop will focus on the following questions:
The typical UX activity is structured in three parts:
a) Session introduction - participant background data
b) Usability test activity
c) Post-session experience - participant demographic data
This structure supports the collection of both structured and unstructured data. The normal considerations must be taken into account for sensitive data treatment and researcher bias.
Who should attend
This workshop will appeal to researchers with an interest in mixed-methods. Anyone interested in how UX researchers typically structure test activities with participants will gain insights on unmoderated data collection.
Are you involved in a research study where there are multiple viewpoints or complex alternatives? If so, then Card Sorting might be a technique for you to examine the relative strength of choices. Are your research participants distributed geographically and open to using a variety of technologies? The recruitment and data collection techniques/tools frequently used in UX might be just what you need.
* Download and support site for "NodeXL Basic" - the network overview, discovery and exploration add-in for Excel. If you can make a pie chart, you can now make a social media network map.
For background and resources related to NodeXL, please have a look at:
* NodeXLGraphGallery: A collection of social media network visualizations, descriptions, and data sets for download. Also the download point for NodeXL Pro.
http://nodexlgraphgallery.org/Pages/Default.aspx
* Connected Action Blog about social media, sociology, information visualization, and networks:
http://www.connectedaction.net
Description: We now live in a sea of tweets, posts, blogs, and updates coming from a significant fraction of the people in the connected world. Our personal and professional relationships are now made up as much of texts, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, documents, slides, and game play as by face-to-face interactions. Social media can be a bewildering stream of comments, a daunting fire hose of content. With better tools and a few key concepts from the social sciences, the social media swarm of favorites, comments, tags, likes, ratings, updates and links can be brought into clearer focus to reveal key people, topics and sub-communities. As more social interactions move through machine-readable data sets new insights and illustrations of human relationships and organizations become possible. But new forms of data require new tools to collect, analyze, and communicate insights.
The Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org), formed in 2010 to develop open tools and open data sets, and to foster open scholarship related to social media. The Foundation's current focus is on creating and publishing tools that enable social media network analysis and visualization from widely used services like email, Twitter, Facebook, flickr, YouTube and the WWW. The Foundation has released the NodeXL project (http://nodexl.codeplex.com/), a spreadsheet add-in that supports "network overview discovery and exploration". The tool fits inside your existing copy of Excel in Office (2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016) and makes creating a social network map similar to the process of making a pie chart.
Using NodeXL, users can easily make a map of public social media conversations around topics that matter to them. Maps of the connections among the people who recently said the name of a product, brand or event can reveal key positions and clusters in the crowd. Some people who talk about a topic are more in the "center" of the graph, they may be key influential members in the population. NodeXL makes it a simple task to sort people in a population by their network location to find key people in core or bridge positions. NodeXL supports the exploration of social media with import features that pull data from personal email indexes on the desktop, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Wikis, blogs and WWW hyper-links. The tool allows non-programmers to quickly generate useful network statistics and metrics and create visualizations of network graphs.
A book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world is available from Morgan-Kaufmann. The book provides an introduction to the history and core concepts of social network analysis along with a series of step-by-step instructions that illustrate the use of the key features of NodeXL. The second half of the book is dedicated to chapters by a number of leading social media researchers that each focus on a single social media service and the networks it contains. Chapters on Twitter, email, YouTube, flickr, Facebook, Wikis, and the World Wide Web illustrate the network data structures that are common to all social media services.
A recent report co-authored with the Pew Research Center's Internet Project documents the discovery of the six basic forms of social media network structures present in social media platforms like Twitter. The report, "Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters" provides a step by step guide to analyzing social media networks.
Pre-requisites:
For background and resources related to NodeXL, please have a look at:
* NodeXLGraphGallery: A collection of social media network visualizations, descriptions, and data sets for download. Also the download point for NodeXL Pro.
http://nodexlgraphgallery.org/Pages/Default.aspx
* Connected Action Blog about social media, sociology, information visualization, and networks:
http://www.connectedaction.net
* Download and support site for "NodeXL Basic" - the network overview, discovery and exploration add-in for Excel. If you can make a pie chart, you can now make a social media network map.
* The Social Media Research Foundation creates NodeXL and fosters the creation of social media and network science scholarship:
* Scholarly publications: NodeXL is used frequently in peer reviewed publications as shown by Google Scholar search results:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=nodexl
* Recent press: Applying social media network maps to political and social topics:
* Video: overview of NodeXL
Personal Democracy Forum 2015: Picturing Online Crowds
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith/2015-pdfmarc-smithnode-xlsocial-media-sna
The Next Web 2014: Mapping social media networks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5RonanIOF8
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith/2014-the-next-websmrfnode-xlsnasocial-media-networks
Charting Collections of Connections
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwVvQhhLUqc
#NodeXL Exploring Twitter's Social Graph
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXLXHKnDi9s
San Francisco Online Community Meetup March 26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCYpAmk_2-Y&
* Slides: overview of the NodeXL project and its applications
https://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith/2016-socialmediaorg-marc-smithnodexlsocial-media-sna
Instructor’s Bio
Dr. Marc A. Smith
Chief Social Scientist
Connected Action Consulting Group
Marc@connectedaction.net
http://www.connectedaction.nethttp://nodexl.codeplex.com
http://twitter.com/marc_smith
http://www.smrfoundation.org/
Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Smith co-founded and directs the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.
Smith is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups. Along with Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman, he is the co-author and editor of Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, from Morgan-Kaufmann which is a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions.
Smith's research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many "groups" in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: http://www.connectedaction.net/marc-smith/). Smith's goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. While at Microsoft Research, he founded the Community Technologies Group and led the development of the "Netscan" web application and data mining engine that allowed researchers studying Usenet newsgroups and related repositories of threaded conversations to get reports on the rates of posting, posters, crossposting, thread lengt
...
Canada’s Public Policy Forum produced a 2017 report, entitled ‘The Shattered Mirror’, which details the future of news and related policy in Canada. The report raises a number of major issues concerning news, democracy and trust in the digital age and provides a list of broad policy recommendations. This seems like an excellent place to begin our workshop: What are the major concerns over news and information in the digital age?
Participants will participate in guided small group discussion on key questions the report brings to light such as: What academic research is needed to further policy objectives? How might we implement Creative Commons licensing for the CBC? What should/could the government do to counter “fake news”? And are these the right priorities?
This early discussion will help set the tone for the rest of the workshop and encourage participants to share their own experiences as each project is presented.
References
Public Policy Forum, ‘The Shattered Mirror: News, Democracy and Trust in the Digital Age’, Ottawa, ON, Canada: Public Policy Forum. Available online at https://shatteredmirror.ca
Part 2. Search and Politics: Fake News, Filter Bubbles, and Echo Chambers (William Dutton, Elizabeth Dubois, and Craig Robertson)
Global debate over the impact of algorithms and search on shaping political opinions has increased following 2016 election results in Europe and the US. Powerful images of the Internet enabling access to a global treasure trove of information have shifted to worries over whether those who use search engines and social media are being fed inaccurate, false, or politically targeted information that distorts public opinion. There are serious questions over whether biases embedded in the algorithms that drive search engines and social media have major political consequences, such as creating filter bubbles or echo chambers. For example, do search engines and social media provide people with information that aligns with their beliefs and opinions or do they challenge them to consider countervailing perspectives? Most generally, the predominant concern is do these media have a major impact on public opinion and political viewpoints, and if so, for the better or worse.
This study addresses these issues by asking Internet users how they use search, social media, and other important media to get information about political candidates, issues, and politics generally, as well as what difference it makes for individuals participating in democratic processes. We conducted an online survey of Internet users in seven nations: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the US. Discussion will focus on whether this research can be used to identify those most vulnerable to fake news or bias in access, and what can be done to support them, ranging from media reform to digital media literacy.
References
Dutton, W. H. (2017), ‘Fake News, Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles’, The Conversation, available online at: https://theconversation.com/fake-news-echo-chambers-and-filter-bubbles-underresearched-and-overhyped-76688
Dutton, W.H., Reisdorf, B. C., Dubois, E., Blank, G., Ahmad, S., and Robertson, C. (2017), ‘Search and Politics: The Uses and Impacts of Search in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United States’, Quello Center Working Paper available online at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2960697
Part 3. Processing News (Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch)
Internet users are increasingly getting their news from social media, and they are also doing so more passively. Given the growing “news-finds-me” perception on social media, questions arise about how social media users assess the credibility of news content and what they learn from it. A collection of studies shows that while social media users actively engage with news content on social media platforms, this does not translate to greater knowledge about current events. Furthermore, users may not differentiate between sources when judging the credibility of news content.
The primary study discussed in this workshop is built on this work and experimentally tests how Facebook users assess and learn from news content in Facebook news posts where multiple media and friend sources must be considered. The results show that source effects on credibility as well as learning depend heavily on a user’s involvement in the content.
Discussion of this research will focus on the implications of this growing body of research that shows a lack of beneficial effects of social media news exposure on knowledge. Participants will share their own social media experience and expertise to brainstorm and compile a shareable guide on: 1) what user and technology elements may contribute to the disconnect between social media use and current events understanding, 2) what role social media should have in one’s engagement with current events, and 3) what actions users can take to use these media more meaningfully for their news consumption.
Reference
Oeldorf-Hirsch, A., & DeVoss, C. (2017, May). Processing layered news sources on Facebook: Effects on credibility and learning. Presented at the 67th annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), San Diego, CA.
Part 4. Directions for Research, Policy, and Practice (Ed Greenspon)
In the final segment of this workshop we return to our initial brainstorming groups to review the day’s insights in terms of next steps for research and policy. We then discuss broad questions as a group.
Some guiding questions include: What are the missing pieces in our understanding of the dynamics of individual and collective exposure to news and information about politics? What are the priorities for research? What are the major implications for policy and practice? Is panic over contemporary issues leading to inappropriate initiatives for governance, policy and practice? Are there constructive steps to support news and information for democracy in the digital age, such as around digital media literacy?
Workshop Facilitator
Anatoliy Gruzd, PhD, Ryerson University, Canada
Deena Abul Fottouh, Ph.D, McMaster University, Canada
Prerequisites:
Workshop Details
Participants will learn how to use SNA to analyze online communication networks. This part will also focus on how to use R package called statnet to perform hypothesis testing using Exponential Random Graph Modelling (ERGM). In particular, participants will learn how to use ERMG to test whether there is a tendency of online participants to connect to other users based on a common characteristic such as gender or their location.
Instructor’s Bio
Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd is a Canada Research Chair in Social Media Data Stewardship, Associate Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University (Canada) and Director of the Social Media Lab. He is also a co-editor of a multidisciplinary journal on Big Data and Society published by Sage and a co-editor of a special issue on Measuring Influence in Social Media for American Behavioral Scientist and a special issue on Understanding Online Communities for Information, Communication & Society. His research initiatives explore how the advent of social media is changing the ways in which people communicate, collaborate and disseminate information and how these changes impact the social, economic and political norms and structures of modern society.
Dr. Deena Abul Fottouh has recently finished her PhD in sociology at McMaster University. She is a holder of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for her research on Twitter networks of the activists of the Egyptian revolution. Deena’s research interests are in digital activism, computational sociology, social movements, and political sociology. She specializes in social network analysis, especially online networks. In her dissertation, Deena studied the evolution of Twitter networks of activists of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and the turn of the movement from solidarity to schism. During her time at McMaster, Deena has travelled many times to the United States to receive extensive training in methods of social network analysis and scraping online data. She has presented her work in many international conferences of social network analysis. Her interest in digital activism has earned her a fellowship at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University. Before joining McMaster, Deena has been working as a Socio-economic Research Specialist with the United Nations Development Programme.
The workshop will focus on the following questions:
The typical UX activity is structured in three parts:
a) Session introduction - participant background data
b) Usability test activity
c) Post-session experience - participant demographic data
This structure supports the collection of both structured and unstructured data. The normal considerations must be taken into account for sensitive data treatment and researcher bias.
Who should attend
This workshop will appeal to researchers with an interest in mixed-methods. Anyone interested in how UX researchers typically structure test activities with participants will gain insights on unmoderated data collection.
Are you involved in a research study where there are multiple viewpoints or complex alternatives? If so, then Card Sorting might be a technique for you to examine the relative strength of choices. Are your research participants distributed geographically and open to using a variety of technologies? The recruitment and data collection techniques/tools frequently used in UX might be just what you need.
Pre-requisites:
* Download and support site for "NodeXL Basic" - the network overview, discovery and exploration add-in for Excel. If you can make a pie chart, you can now make a social media network map.
For background and resources related to NodeXL, please have a look at:
* NodeXLGraphGallery: A collection of social media network visualizations, descriptions, and data sets for download. Also the download point for NodeXL Pro.
http://nodexlgraphgallery.org/Pages/Default.aspx
* Connected Action Blog about social media, sociology, information visualization, and networks:
http://www.connectedaction.net
Description: We now live in a sea of tweets, posts, blogs, and updates coming from a significant fraction of the people in the connected world. Our personal and professional relationships are now made up as much of texts, emails, phone calls, photos, videos, documents, slides, and game play as by face-to-face interactions. Social media can be a bewildering stream of comments, a daunting fire hose of content. With better tools and a few key concepts from the social sciences, the social media swarm of favorites, comments, tags, likes, ratings, updates and links can be brought into clearer focus to reveal key people, topics and sub-communities. As more social interactions move through machine-readable data sets new insights and illustrations of human relationships and organizations become possible. But new forms of data require new tools to collect, analyze, and communicate insights.
The Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org), formed in 2010 to develop open tools and open data sets, and to foster open scholarship related to social media. The Foundation's current focus is on creating and publishing tools that enable social media network analysis and visualization from widely used services like email, Twitter, Facebook, flickr, YouTube and the WWW. The Foundation has released the NodeXL project (http://nodexl.codeplex.com/), a spreadsheet add-in that supports "network overview discovery and exploration". The tool fits inside your existing copy of Excel in Office (2007, 2010, 2013 and 2016) and makes creating a social network map similar to the process of making a pie chart.
Using NodeXL, users can easily make a map of public social media conversations around topics that matter to them. Maps of the connections among the people who recently said the name of a product, brand or event can reveal key positions and clusters in the crowd. Some people who talk about a topic are more in the "center" of the graph, they may be key influential members in the population. NodeXL makes it a simple task to sort people in a population by their network location to find key people in core or bridge positions. NodeXL supports the exploration of social media with import features that pull data from personal email indexes on the desktop, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Wikis, blogs and WWW hyper-links. The tool allows non-programmers to quickly generate useful network statistics and metrics and create visualizations of network graphs.
A book Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world is available from Morgan-Kaufmann. The book provides an introduction to the history and core concepts of social network analysis along with a series of step-by-step instructions that illustrate the use of the key features of NodeXL. The second half of the book is dedicated to chapters by a number of leading social media researchers that each focus on a single social media service and the networks it contains. Chapters on Twitter, email, YouTube, flickr, Facebook, Wikis, and the World Wide Web illustrate the network data structures that are common to all social media services.
A recent report co-authored with the Pew Research Center's Internet Project documents the discovery of the six basic forms of social media network structures present in social media platforms like Twitter. The report, "Mapping Twitter Topic Networks: From Polarized Crowds to Community Clusters" provides a step by step guide to analyzing social media networks.
Pre-requisites:
For background and resources related to NodeXL, please have a look at:
* NodeXLGraphGallery: A collection of social media network visualizations, descriptions, and data sets for download. Also the download point for NodeXL Pro.
http://nodexlgraphgallery.org/Pages/Default.aspx
* Connected Action Blog about social media, sociology, information visualization, and networks:
http://www.connectedaction.net
* Download and support site for "NodeXL Basic" - the network overview, discovery and exploration add-in for Excel. If you can make a pie chart, you can now make a social media network map.
* The Social Media Research Foundation creates NodeXL and fosters the creation of social media and network science scholarship:
* Scholarly publications: NodeXL is used frequently in peer reviewed publications as shown by Google Scholar search results:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=nodexl
* Recent press: Applying social media network maps to political and social topics:
* Video: overview of NodeXL
Personal Democracy Forum 2015: Picturing Online Crowds
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith/2015-pdfmarc-smithnode-xlsocial-media-sna
The Next Web 2014: Mapping social media networks
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b5RonanIOF8
Slides: http://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith/2014-the-next-websmrfnode-xlsnasocial-media-networks
Charting Collections of Connections
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwVvQhhLUqc
#NodeXL Exploring Twitter's Social Graph
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bXLXHKnDi9s
San Francisco Online Community Meetup March 26
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCYpAmk_2-Y&
* Slides: overview of the NodeXL project and its applications
https://www.slideshare.net/Marc_A_Smith/2016-socialmediaorg-marc-smithnodexlsocial-media-sna
Instructor’s Bio
Dr. Marc A. Smith
Chief Social Scientist
Connected Action Consulting Group
Marc@connectedaction.net
http://www.connectedaction.nethttp://nodexl.codeplex.com
http://twitter.com/marc_smith
http://www.smrfoundation.org/
Marc Smith is a sociologist specializing in the social organization of online communities and computer mediated interaction. Smith leads the Connected Action consulting group and lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. Smith co-founded and directs the Social Media Research Foundation (http://www.smrfoundation.org/), a non-profit devoted to open tools, data, and scholarship related to social media research.
Smith is the co-editor with Peter Kollock of Communities in Cyberspace (Routledge), a collection of essays exploring the ways identity; interaction and social order develop in online groups. Along with Derek Hansen and Ben Shneiderman, he is the co-author and editor of Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world, from Morgan-Kaufmann which is a guide to mapping connections created through computer-mediated interactions.
Smith's research focuses on computer-mediated collective action: the ways group dynamics change when they take place in and through social cyberspaces. Many "groups" in cyberspace produce public goods and organize themselves in the form of a commons (for related papers see: http://www.connectedaction.net/marc-smith/). Smith's goal is to visualize these social cyberspaces, mapping and measuring their structure, dynamics and life cycles. While at Microsoft Research, he founded the Community Technologies Group and led the development of the "Netscan" web application and data mining engine that allowed researchers studying Usenet newsgroups and related repositories of threaded convers
...
Canada’s Public Policy Forum produced a 2017 report, entitled ‘The Shattered Mirror’, which details the future of news and related policy in Canada. The report raises a number of major issues concerning news, democracy and trust in the digital age and provides a list of broad policy recommendations. This seems like an excellent place to begin our workshop: What are the major concerns over news and information in the digital age?
Participants will participate in guided small group discussion on key questions the report brings to light such as: What academic research is needed to further policy objectives? How might we implement Creative Commons licensing for the CBC? What should/could the government do to counter “fake news”? And are these the right priorities?
This early discussion will help set the tone for the rest of the workshop and encourage participants to share their own experiences as each project is presented.
References
Public Policy Forum, ‘The Shattered Mirror: News, Democracy and Trust in the Digital Age’, Ottawa, ON, Canada: Public Policy Forum. Available online at https://shatteredmirror.ca
Part 2. Search and Politics: Fake News, Filter Bubbles, and Echo Chambers (William Dutton, Elizabeth Dubois, and Craig Robertson)
Global debate over the impact of algorithms and search on shaping political opinions has increased following 2016 election results in Europe and the US. Powerful images of the Internet enabling access to a global treasure trove of information have shifted to worries over whether those who use search engines and social media are being fed inaccurate, false, or politically targeted information that distorts public opinion. There are serious questions over whether biases embedded in the algorithms that drive search engines and social media have major political consequences, such as creating filter bubbles or echo chambers. For example, do search engines and social media provide people with information that aligns with their beliefs and opinions or do they challenge them to consider countervailing perspectives? Most generally, the predominant concern is do these media have a major impact on public opinion and political viewpoints, and if so, for the better or worse.
This study addresses these issues by asking Internet users how they use search, social media, and other important media to get information about political candidates, issues, and politics generally, as well as what difference it makes for individuals participating in democratic processes. We conducted an online survey of Internet users in seven nations: Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the US. Discussion will focus on whether this research can be used to identify those most vulnerable to fake news or bias in access, and what can be done to support them, ranging from media reform to digital media literacy.
References
Dutton, W. H. (2017), ‘Fake News, Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles’, The Conversation, available online at: https://theconversation.com/fake-news-echo-chambers-and-filter-bubbles-underresearched-and-overhyped-76688
Dutton, W.H., Reisdorf, B. C., Dubois, E., Blank, G., Ahmad, S., and Robertson, C. (2017), ‘Search and Politics: The Uses and Impacts of Search in Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain, and the United States’, Quello Center Working Paper available online at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2960697
Part 3. Processing News (Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch)
Internet users are increasingly getting their news from social media, and they are also doing so more passively. Given the growing “news-finds-me” perception on social media, questions arise about how social media users assess the credibility of news content and what they learn from it. A collection of studies shows that while social media users actively engage with news content on social media platforms, this does not translate to greater knowledge about current events. Furthermore, users may not differentiate between sources when judging the credibility of news content.
The primary study discussed in this workshop is built on this work and experimentally tests how Facebook users assess and learn from news content in Facebook news posts where multiple media and friend sources must be considered. The results show that source effects on credibility as well as learning depend heavily on a user’s involvement in the content.
Discussion of this research will focus on the implications of this growing body of research that shows a lack of beneficial effects of social media news exposure on knowledge. Participants will share their own social media experience and expertise to brainstorm and compile a shareable guide on: 1) what user and technology elements may contribute to the disconnect between social media use and current events understanding, 2) what role social media should have in one’s engagement with current events, and 3) what actions users can take to use these media more meaningfully for their news consumption.
Reference
Oeldorf-Hirsch, A., & DeVoss, C. (2017, May). Processing layered news sources on Facebook: Effects on credibility and learning. Presented at the 67th annual conference of the International Communication Association (ICA), San Diego, CA.
Part 4. Directions for Research, Policy, and Practice (Ed Greenspon)
In the final segment of this workshop we return to our initial brainstorming groups to review the day’s insights in terms of next steps for research and policy. We then discuss broad questions as a group.
Some guiding questions include: What are the missing pieces in our understanding of the dynamics of individual and collective exposure to news and information about politics? What are the priorities for research? What are the major implications for policy and practice? Is panic over contemporary issues leading to inappropriate initiatives for governance, policy and practice? Are there constructive steps to support news and information for democracy in the digital age, such as around digital media literacy?
THIS IS PART 2 OF THIS WORKSHOP, PLEASE MAKE SURE TO SIGN-UP FOR PART 1.
Workshop Facilitator
Anatoliy Gruzd, PhD, Ryerson University, Canada
Deena Abul Fottouh, Ph.D, McMaster University, Canada
Prerequisites:
Workshop Details
Participants will learn how to use SNA to analyze online communication networks. This part will also focus on how to use R package called statnet to perform hypothesis testing using Exponential Random Graph Modelling (ERGM). In particular, participants will learn how to use ERMG to test whether there is a tendency of online participants to connect to other users based on a common characteristic such as gender or their location.
Instructor’s Bio
Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd is a Canada Research Chair in Social Media Data Stewardship, Associate Professor at the Ted Rogers School of Management at Ryerson University (Canada) and Director of the Social Media Lab. He is also a co-editor of a multidisciplinary journal on Big Data and Society published by Sage and a co-editor of a special issue on Measuring Influence in Social Media for American Behavioral Scientist and a special issue on Understanding Online Communities for Information, Communication & Society. His research initiatives explore how the advent of social media is changing the ways in which people communicate, collaborate and disseminate information and how these changes impact the social, economic and political norms and structures of modern society.
Dr. Deena Abul Fottouh has recently finished her PhD in sociology at McMaster University. She is a holder of the Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship for her research on Twitter networks of the activists of the Egyptian revolution. Deena’s research interests are in digital activism, computational sociology, social movements, and political sociology. She specializes in social network analysis, especially online networks. In her dissertation, Deena studied the evolution of Twitter networks of activists of the 2011 Egyptian revolution, and the turn of the movement from solidarity to schism. During her time at McMaster, Deena has travelled many times to the United States to receive extensive training in methods of social network analysis and scraping online data. She has presented her work in many international conferences of social network analysis. Her interest in digital activism has earned her a fellowship at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University. Before joining McMaster, Deena has been working as a Socio-economic Research Specialist with the United Nations Development Programme.
Location: 10 Dundas St East (Cineplex building corner of Yonge & Dundas St. This is also the same building where the Social Media Lab is located.) *
*When you enter 10 Dundas East, take escalators up the 4th floor or look for the elevator bank (marked as Office Tower) next to Starbucks on the 1st floor.
Lee Rainie, director of internet, science, and technology research at the Pew Research Center, will discuss new research about how citizens are trying to navigate the challenging world of “fake news” and “truthiness” on social media. He will look at how people are trying to adjust to the turmoil over the impact of social media on political deliberation and what this means about the concepts of “expertise” and “trust".
Politics is a huge part of the conversation on Twitter and for the team at Twitter Canada, it's also a key component of Twitter engagement strategy with the media. Join the organization's Head of Communications Cam Gordon for an inside look at how the Twitter uses data, insights and research as an engine for telling political stories in Canada. Focus will be on governments at the municipal, provincial and federal level with an added look at how the data and conversations change (both in the media and on Twitter) at each level.
Caroline Haythornthwaite is Professor, School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, with former academic positions at The University of British Columbia, and University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an earlier career as a programmer and systems analyst. Her research focuses on how the Internet and information and communication technologies support work, learning and social interaction, including research on social media, e-learning and learning analytics, and online crowds and communities.
https://haythorn.wordpress.com/Stephanie Teasley is Research Professor and Director of the Learning, Education & Design Lab (LED), School of Information, University of Michigan. Her research has focuses on issues of collaboration and learning, looking specifically at how sociotechnical systems can be used to support effective collaborative processes and successful learning outcomes. As Director of the LED lab, she leads learning analytics-based research to investigate how instructional technologies and digital media are used to innovate teaching, learning, and collaboration.
Panel Speakers:The panel will be led and moderated by Caroline Haythornthwaite and Stephanie Teasley. We will present an introductory framing of the panel and the topic of Women in Social Media: Safe and Unsafe Spaces followed by short presentations by panel members Ingrid Erickson, Libby Hempfill, and Alyssa Wise. Stephanie Teasley will moderate a Q&A period consisting first of questions to panel members to address women’s experiences with social media as well as in academia or other work environments, and then opening up the Q&A session to the audience for further discussion.
