New ethical guidelines for Social Media Research published

Hayley Lepps is a Researcher at NatCen Social Research

Earlier in the year I was invited to attend a two-day workshop hosted by the University of Aberdeen, as part of their ESRC‐funded project “Social Media, Privacy and Risk: Towards More Ethical Research Methodologies”. 

The workshop was attended by some of the leading thinkers & practitioners in social media research, and based on our experiences and research (including my own work on NatCen's “Research using Social Media: Users’ Views” project), we aimed to develop a set of flexible guidelines for the ethical use of social media data in research, intended to be used by researchers, students, ethics committees, funding bodies, and anyone else with an interest in the ethics of working with social media data. Following the workshop, the outputs were then pulled together by the team at Aberdeen, and the draft guidelines were discussed at the AcSS/ NSMNSS conference on ethics and social media research. 

I was very happy to see the guidelines published last week; I would very much recommend anyone interested in conducting ethical social media research gives them a read, and I hope they provide a useful contribution to ongoing debates and best practice in ethical social media research in the social sciences. You can find the final version of the guidelines here: www.dotrural.ac.uk/socialmediaresearchethics.pdf

Using Big Data to Solve Social Science Problems

Curtis Jessop is a Senior Researcher at NatCen Social Research and is the Network Lead for the NSMNSS network

On Wednesday 29^th June I attended a roundtable hosted by our network partners SAGE on using big data to solve social science problems. It was a great day, with contributions from leading researchers and lots of discussion of some of the key issues of working with big data in social science.

Jane Elliott began with an overview of the ESRC’s Big Data Network. She identified the difficulties with data access that earlier phases had faced, but also highlighted key challenges that big data social science currently faces:

1. Methodological

• Can we apply the same qualitative techniques/statistical inferences we have in the past?
• Are social scientists (falling) behind in using machine learning & algorithms? What are the implications of these methods?

2. Relevance of research

• Making sure we use big data to answer pertinent social science questions, and not just focus on methods

3. Ethics at a macro & micro level

• Working ethically with big data - data security, anonymity, informed consent & data ownership
• What are the implications of a ‘big data society’/algorithm-led decision making?

New methods, tools and techniques for big data research

Giuseppe Veltri outlined how data-driven science differs from ‘traditional’ social science research as it generates hypotheses and insights from the data, rather than theory, combining abductive, inductive & deductive approaches. Further, Phillip Brooker identified a tension in big data analysis between wanting to use qualitative research approaches with data of a scale that requires numerical treatment. As a result, social scientists need to work with ‘unfamiliar’ techniques and software.

Tools for Big Data analysis

It was generally agreed that existing software are not fit for addressing academic/social science research questions. Also, tools offered by commercial companies are often ‘black boxes’, when social scientists need to be transparent on the algorithms they use as they are part of the methodology.

Many at the roundtable have therefore developed their own tools (e.g. COSMOS, Textonics, Chorus, & Method52 from CASM) to enable them to conduct analysis in a manner they wanted to. However, it was felt there was still some way to go - many of these tools are ‘in-house’ and ongoing funding/support is needed to develop something more stable, well-supported, and ‘outward facing’.

Interdisciplinary working

One approach to addressing the challenges of big data analysis is working in interdisciplinary teams (in particular linking between social & computer science departments). Luke Sloan and Mark Carrigan identified the key challenge of this at a ‘human level’ is ensuring a common understanding of language, after which it was easy to have an open discussion and there were rarely disagreements. Mark argued that what was key was not necessarily making sure that everyone had the same definitions, but that there was an understanding that different fields may have different perspectives.

Mark Kennedy, based on his experiences at the Data Science Institute, emphasised the importance of ‘getting excited’ about the right research question, not just focusing on the technology, and then building a team based on what skills you need to fill that gap.

However, attendees felt that there were structural barriers to interdisciplinary working in academia – departmental silos, geography, navigating different funding bodies, finding journals to publish in, and demonstrating value for the REF were all recognised as problems, although it was also mentioned that funding increasingly supported this approach.

Training in the social sciences

Quite early in the discussion, the question was raised that if there is such a clear skills gap in the social sciences, why had universities not responded to it?

Although it was accepted that training needed to address big data methods, there were differing opinions on how feasible this might be. Adding new techniques into methods courses was welcomed, but to what extent was this achievable when these are already packed covering ‘traditional’ methods? Further, given the relative rarity of established social scientists with this skill-set, who would provide this teaching?

Although it was felt that new students are open to using Python or R/new statistical techniques, this scarcity of trainers with the skills to teach both programming and its application within social sciences was again identified as a problem. Giving students (and academics) access to data science training materials that are framed by social science problems, and relevant dummy data to work with, was suggested as a way to start addressing this.

Answering social science questions with Big Data

While discussing his own research, Slava Mikhaylov highlighted that a good way to make impact is, rather than starting with a research question, to aim to solve a problem. This was echoed by Carl Miller, who outlined some principles that Demos follow for making impact:

• Look beyond academic funders – if research is funded by a government department, they’re going to have to listen to it!
• Ask the right question – what is interesting to a researcher vs. a policy maker
• Answer quickly – policy interests change, and research won’t make an impact if everyone’s moved on
• Diversify outputs – can they be real-time, interactive, engaging?
• Networking – who are the champions of big data research?

 Carl emphasised that was just the approach that Demos used, and may not be appropriate for all research or audiences. He also mentioned you need to work hard in a new discipline to be responsible and transparent about what your research doesn’t do or say.

Ethics of research using Big Data

Anne Alexander differentiated between the ethics of research using big data and the ethics of doing research in a networked world.

On the latter, Anne felt that there has not been enough reflection on the implications of the ‘datafication’ of human interaction, and that we need to de-mystify these processes and consider what the use of machine learning/algorithms means for society (e.g. their potential for discrimination).

Anne emphasised the need to take into consideration the public’s views on this when considering Big Data research, a point re-enforced by Steve Ginnis, whose work at Ipsos Mori on developing ethical guidelines for social media research drew on public ethics, existing industry guidelines and legal frameworks.

Steve’s research identified that the public both have low awareness of, and are not keen on, their social media data being used for research. This was not just due to concerns about privacy/anonymization – people were uncomfortable with being profiled and its possible implications.

That said, participants were willing to weigh up the risks and benefits, and context (who is doing the research and why) was important. Nonetheless, the ‘fundamentals’ (consent, what information, anonymization, etc.) played a much larger role in whether they felt research using social data was appropriate.

Both Anne & Steve emphasised that ethics is an ongoing process, not a one-off event at the start of a project – they need to be considered at the collection, analysis and publication stages of the research cycle.

Some concluding thoughts

Carl Miller identified that in the context of pressure for evidence-based policy, digital by default, and the open data initiative, there has never been a better time for social scientists to make impact with big data research.

Wednesday’s session demonstrated how far big data analysis in the social sciences has come over recent years and it is impressive to hear how much work has been put into developing the tools and methods to mould this rich, but novel, form of data into social insights.

However, the session also showed that there are number of areas that still need to be addressed if we are to make the most of big data:

• Access to large data sets continues to be an issue, be they proprietary, public, or administrative. We need to bargain collectively to talk to large, often global, actors and argue for academic access.
• There is a skills gap among social scientists for analysing big data, and support is needed to help develop the required methodological and programming skills.
• The interdisciplinary working required for big data analysis can be challenging, and we need to work to enable effective collaboration.
• Developing an ethical approach to big data analysis is challenging given its novelty, variety, and changing nature. Any framework needs to provide practical guidance to researchers while remaining flexible and responsive to changing contexts.
• Available tools for big data analysis can be expensive, lack transparency, or inappropriate for social science research. A maintained central library of available tools, with appropriate documentation and guidance could be extremely useful.

Social media research: Issues of performativity and validity

Keeva Rooney is a researcher at NatCen focusing on health surveys using bio-medical data. She has a BA (hons) in Sociology with a specialism in Social Policy from University of Warwick. During her studies, Keeva often used social media in her research, with one of her project’s focusing on online facebook groups for disabled people affected by the bedroom tax.

Social media research attracts many researchers due to its offer of practicality, creativity and accuracy which comes from its often covert nature. The idea that you can produce valid research by analysing people’s online activity is attractive to researchers looking for more innovative and contemporary ways to achieve a true insight into society. However, is the assumption that people act online as they would offline a valid one? And if not, does this raise concerns over the reliability, representativeness and overall accuracy of using social media for research purposes?

Feminist theorist Judith Butler studied how people ‘perform’ gender, be it within or outside their assigned gender norms. She believed that it was this expression of gender, not the biological sex itself, which determined gender [a]. Whilst Butler used the concept of performativity to deconstruct issues around gender, the same concept could be applied to how we use social media: do we use social media to construct a distinct identity, or is social media purely an extension of how we already perform within wider society, and does this matter for Social Media researchers?

I will be analysing this argument using two research ideologies; positivism and interpretivism [b].

On the one hand, a positivist approach suggests that social research can uncover an empirical truth about people and society. Positivists aim to find this truth in all aspects of society, using mainly quantitative data such as surveys or content analysis. For example, when analysing social media, positivists may often use sentiment analysis to analyse online attitudes and opinions of the user. For this data to be valid for understanding ‘real world’ attitudes, the opinions expressed online by social media users must be an accurate reflection of their offline beliefs. Therefore it could be argued that if someone is not being their ‘true self’ online, any conclusions drawn from this research may also not be valid.

However, it could be argued that the online persona cannot be disconnected from the offline reality. That is to say that how people act online is often a valid reflection of how they act offline. For example, a recent psychological study into internet trolling showed that those who enjoyed trolling often displayed characteristics such as sadism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism offline [c].

On the other hand, an interpretivist approach suggests that in order to analyse actions and attitudes accurately, the researcher must take the user’s interpretation of themselves as truth; when it comes to social media, how users portray themselves online is what researchers use as fact. From this perspective, any online ‘performance’ of the participant doesn’t make the research any less valid because the participant’s interpretation of their reality is always accurate.

However, what happens if people reject their online persona once it has been researched, as is often the case with people who display offensive or criminal online behaviour? As Stephen Webster’s study showed, some people will try to disassociate their online behaviour from their ‘real’ offline life, claiming that how they act online is not how they ‘really act’ [d] and some may even deny that it was them, instead saying that their account was hacked [e]. Whilst this raises several questions (such as how can you know who you are researching online), it also raises ethical concerns if someone believes that a researcher has misrepresented them by basing research solely on their online behaviour.

As the ‘troll’ studies show, online personas can often be a true reflection of offline actions and opinions. However, the extent of this may be unclear, and participants may disassociate themselves from those personas. Researchers should always consider whether social media can be used to accurately portray and analyse personal and public opinion, and if more traditional research methods should be paired with this to create a more triangulated and accurate set of data.

_________________________________________________________________

[a] Felluga, D: ‘Modules on Butler: On Performativity’ Introductory Guide to Critical Theory https://www.cla.purdue.edu/English/theory/genderandsex/modules/butlerperformativity.html 
[b] While I acknowledge that not all researchers will fit into either ideology, I believe that analysing validity in online research can be done by discussing these two fundamental research perspectives
[c] Buckels, E.E; Trapnell, P.D; Paulhusc, D.L: ‘Trolls just want to have fun’ http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886914000324 
[d] Webster, S: ‘What is trolling, and why do we behave so differently online?’ http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/what-is-trolling-and-why-do-we-behave-so-differently-online-9799655.html  
[e] Wainwright, M: ‘Man who racially abused Stan Collymore on Twitter spared prison’ http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2012/mar/21/man-racially-abused-collymore-twitter-spared-prison 

Things that keep me awake at night: ethical considerations when researching fan communities online

Milena Popova is a PhD researcher at the Digital Cultures Research Centre, UWE Bristol. She is researching approaches to sexual consent in fanfiction and online fan communities. She tweets as @elmyra and blogs about her research at pornresearcher.eu.

My PhD research focuses on depictions of sexual consent in online fanfiction: amateur-produced fiction based on existing media, such as TV shows, movies or books. I am using a range of methods to study the fanfiction community and its cultural output. Here some thoughts on the ethical questions I have come up against while designing and conducting my research.

A brief introduction to the fanfiction community:

Modern fanfiction originated in paper zines, but these days the vast majority of the community (or communities, really) live and communicate online, in spaces that are on the cusp of the private-public boundary. Fanfiction, and the communities that produce it, are a Google search away - if you know about them.

The fanfiction community consists predominantly of women and non-binary people, a majority of whom identify as members of a sexual, gender or romantic minority (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, non-binary, asexual, aromantic, etc.). Statistically, a significant proportion of community members are survivors of sexual or gender-based violence. (In the UK, 45% of women have experienced rape, sexual assault, domestic abuse or stalking. It is reasonable to assume that this is reflected in the make-up of the fanfiction community.) These demographics are reflected in the kinds of stories the community produces: stories which focus on (often queer) sexual and romantic relationships, sexually explicit stories, stories which explore issues of sexual consent extensively and in profoundly nuanced ways - which is the focus of my research.

In many ways, the fanfiction community is vulnerable, though not necessarily in a way you would find as a tickbox on an ethics form. The social stigma attached to marginalised sexualities (including women’s and queer sexualities) means that there are potentially significant social and economic consequences associated with being identified as a reader or writer of erotic fanfiction. Additionally, fanfiction is generally based on copyrighted material (or sometimes real people such as actors, musicians and other celebrities), and there are also legal risks involved in producing and circulating it. Members of the community therefore have developed a range of approaches and tactics to managing their online identities and involvement in fanfiction separately from other online activities. They participate predominantly pseudonymously or anonymously in activities around fanfiction and are often, rightly, wary of outside scrutiny, whether it be by journalists or academics. Having said that, this is also a community with a very strong identity, strong traditions of mutual support, and very much in the habit of theorising itself.

Social Media and the Digital Data Set:

Some of what I study is the fanfiction itself, which is published on authors’ personal blogs and websites, on social media platforms like LiveJournal and Tumblr, and in fanfiction archives such as fanfiction.net (FFN) and the Archive of Our Own (AO3). But I also study fan interactions and fan practices in these semi-public social media spaces. My data set therefore includes podcasts, comments left on fanfiction stories, conversations between community members posted on social media sites, and “meta” (commentary and analysis) which community members produce on topics ranging from the quality of writing in a TV series to in-depth examinations of social and political issues as represented in media and fanfiction. Because I have been a member of the community for nearly two decades, in many cases I also get privileged access to material which isn’t posted publicly, for instance locked LiveJournal posts or AO3 stories.

Things that keep me awake at night:

Below are three case studies of things gone wrong in fandom or online research, and the questions they raise for me.

Theory of Fic Gate: This was an incident in early 2015 where a class of undergraduate students were asked to leave comments on fanfiction as part of their assessment. They had little to no knowledge of the community, their standards, the rules of engagement. They were in fact specifically encouraged to leave a “critical” comment on the stories, something around which there are a lot of social rules within the fanfiction community. These comments caused a lot of upset to individuals whose writing was on the course reading list, as well as a lot of outrage within the fanfiction community who felt disrespected, and some ill will towards researchers and academia. The community organised quickly around one of the writers whose work was on the course reading list and engaged in more or less constructive debate with the course leaders and some of the students.

The incident raises some key questions for online and fandom researchers in general and for my research in particular. Who am I doing this research for? Who am I accountable to? As someone who is both a member of the fanfiction community and an outsider, how do I negotiate these two positions in a way that is respectful to the community, ethical, and still allows me to conduct my research with both quality and integrity?

At least part of the answer for me personally is that I feel accountable to the fanfiction community. I have a responsibility to them to treat them fairly and with respect. It is absolutely vital for me to be deeply familiar with the community and culture, their views and practices, their understanding of themselves and the world, before I engage them directly. This knowledge helps me engage the community respectfully, ask the right ethical questions, and make decisions about what material I expose to wider academic and public scrutiny. I am also working on ways to give the fanfiction community ways to feed back to me and have some control over the research, through my research blog, through interactions with interviewees, and through attending fandom conventions and speaking about my research.

Dalek half balls: “From Dalek half balls to Daft Punk helmets: Mimetic fandom and the crafting of replicas” is a published academic paper by a highly respected fan studies scholar and it makes some interesting points. It also cites and argues directly against theory written by a member of the fanfiction community, published on their LiveJournal. The paper addresses this LiveJournal post as if the two are on a level playing field with each other, ignoring power differentials. As with any other research, it is important to remember that there are power differentials between researchers and the people we study. Just because we can both stick up a blog on the internet and comment on each other’s posts doesn’t make us equal.

On the other hand, I am also increasingly coming to realise that on the subject I am studying - sexual consent - the fanfiction community produces distinct, extensive and nuanced knowledges not available in other communities or even in feminist academia. These knowledges are not in a format that academia would necessarily recognise, and there is considerable potential value in finding ways to disseminate them beyond their current context (though there are also risks involved in this). This raises huge questions about the role of the researcher in this space, and about the researcher’s relationship with the material and the community producing it. A lot of this material is theoretically rich and robust despite its unconventional (for academia) format. It feels wrong to simply treat it as “data”, to take it and put my own stamp on it. On the other hand, I believe it would also be wrong to treat this material and its authors as equal to theory and analysis published in a peer-reviewed journal and engage with it on that level, as that would hold it up to impossible standards.

Key questions for me to consider here: How do my choices of research subject and methodology reproduce or challenge power relations? How can I tweak those choices towards challenging and away from reproducing?

The Facebook Happiness Experiment: In June 2014, it was revealed that Facebook had manipulated users’ newsfeeds with the intention of manipulating their mood. While in my research I am not directly manipulating anyone or anything, I am in many cases conducting something that walks the fine line between covert and participant observation.

This raises some interesting questions. How much of the internet/social media platforms can be legitimately regarded as a public space? What are people’s expectations of privacy, how are they constructed and how are they managed? One common practice in the fanfiction community is privacy through obscurity: those in the know can find us, but most of the world has no idea. With increasing exposure of fanfiction in mainstream media, this expectation is becoming unrealistic, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that community behaviour and practices are always changing in line with these developments.

What is my responsibility as a researcher in terms of meeting those privacy expectations, and what are the practicalities around that? A significant issue for me will be quoting fan conversations and “meta” verbatim when a simple Google search can lead others back to the original source.

These are some of the questions that keep me awake at night. Perhaps the biggest insight for me here is that the vast majority of them are not asked on an ethics application form. While going through the ethics approval process has been a useful starting point for me, I have had to put in a lot of thought outside of and beyond the framework of that single form. There certainly aren’t any universal right answers for these questions, and some days I am not even convinced there is a single right answer for my particular research. There are simply different choices I can make, with as much consultation with the community as possible, while being aware of the power imbalances and responsibilities inherent in my position.

Getting to ‘Yes’ in the digital age

Last Monday (11^th May) the SRA, along with NSMNSS, hosted a seminar looking at ethics and informed consent in the context of online research. As long-standing network members will know, the ethical challenges of conducting research has been something that has consistently cropped up as a core concern for social scientists looking to use social media in their research, and this event demonstrated that this continued to be the case.

Matt Williams from the Social Data Science Lab kicked off proceedings with a discussion of his experiences of ethics in social media research based on his work with COSMOS, a platform for accessing Twitter data.

Matt focussed on some of the issues relating to publishing research based on Twitter data, and how Twitter’s policies relating to the publication of Tweets (showing names, @usernames, and unmodified Tweet text) can clash with researchers requirements of anonymity and protecting participants from harm, before outlining their approach to ‘risk assessment’ before publishing Tweets.

He also introduced some survey research suggesting that social media users were split in how concerned they were about their data being used for research, and that some types of users were more likely to be concerned than others. However, participants seemed to be less concerned about their data being used by universities than government or commercial organisations.

Following Matt (and some role playing!), Janet Salmons talked through some of her experiences of the best way of getting informed participation from potential research respondents in an online environment.

Janet emphasised the importance of building trust and credibility with research participants, and that different types of online communication actually provide opportunities to engage and inform participants; the key is thinking about who your target population is.

For those who missed out, or went and didn’t get everything down at the time, you can find copies Matt and Janet’s slides here and here, and Janet has also provided some additional resources about ethics and online research here.

As is often the case, perhaps the most interesting session was the Q&A at the end, chaired by NatCen’s Kandy Woodfield. The panel & audience discussed a range of questions covering topics such as the difficulties (and ethics) involved in removing participants once analysis has started (or been published!), whether consent can ever be truly ‘informed’, and whether participants need to be reminded of consent for passive (ongoing) observation.

Unfortunately (although perhaps not unexpectedly), there was not enough time to answer all of the attendees’ questions, so NSMNSS are going to be hosting a follow-up #NSMNSS Tweetchat on the ethics of online research on Monday 1^st June at 5pm (UK time).

If you have any questions that you would like to put to the NSMNSS community, please message us @NSMNSS, email us at nsmnss@natcen.ac.uk, or simply leave a comment below!

New Year, New #NSMNSS Twitter Chats, Vote Now!

Last year we had a number of successful twitter chats on topics from generating representative online datasets to the changing roles of social media researchers in an increasingly mediated world. Based on topics arising from our previous discussions, and current issues and emerging trends in online research, we have a number of topics for upcoming #NSMNSS twitter chats this year (see below). However, we really want our chats to be led by you - which topic we should discuss first?  Have a read and cast your votes here!  We will announce the winning topic on Twitter.  The first chat is on Tuesday 3^rd February at 5pm (UK time. You can time check for your location here).

1. To blog or not to blog? What a question! Why are we blogging (or not)? What are the opportunities and challenges of blogging for our research? What are the relationships between blogging and traditional forms of publishing? How can we use quantitative metrics to know more about our audiences and what other information do we need? Can blogging improve scholarship? How can we avoid running out of steam?
2. How can we use social media to reflect participants’ voices?  An experiment in sharing our experiences of representing/reflecting participants voices through different mediums and ideas for how research might make use of social media to co-produce research with participants. How might Pinterest be used to reflect participants’ experiences? How might twitter be used to generate insights on people’s lives?
3. The first #NSMNSS Research Exchange of Favourite Projects and Fresh Ideas: What social media research and initiatives inspire you? What are your ambitions and aims for social media research projects? An opportunity to pool our resources and links to useful articles/websites/tools too!
4. Big data discussion!  How can we define ‘big data’? Where do you start in a ‘big data’ project (tips/advice)? What are the strengths and limitations of using ‘big data’? How can we ensure users ethical rights? What about ‘small data’? What does the future hold for social sciences in terms of new forms of data? Not to forget, we will also discuss ethical issues in big data research!
5. Ways to say ‘I do’ in social media research! How are traditional forms (e.g. print out, sign here) in play for gaining consent in the online world? Which electronic forms work well? Can we record a verbal agreement to participate in research? What about terms and conditions attached to the sites people use? Should we seek permission to quote from social media users?
6. How to pick a platform in social media research: who is using what and why? Where are our participants? How does the platform shape the research? How should we attend to our online identities as researchers? Sharing our experiences of using different platforms in research.

#NSMNSS chats will run on the first Tuesday of every month at 5pm (UK time). Remember to include #NSMNSS in all your posts to help us capture all of the discussion. We will provide a transcript of the Tweetchat on our blog following the event.

Don’t forget to vote! Suggestions for other topics are also most welcome!

 

Three years on, how we've grown...

Kandy Woodfield is one of our NSMNSS network leaders, she's based at NatCen Social Research and you can contact her on Twitter @jess1ecat

I was delighted to be able to present the work of the #NSMNSS network to a roundtable event today hosted by the ESRC and the Indian Council of Social Science Research. The event, supported by the Newton Fund, aimed to bring together academics working in social media research in both the UK and India to explore shared interests and opportunities for collaboration. It was a lively discussion and provided an opportunity for me to reflect on how far the network has come in the three years we have been building our community. Here's the presentation:

D-day minus 4 at #bookofblogs HQ

It's been a whirlwind summer, full of sport, sunshine, a bit of rain (at least here in the UK) and I hope you've had some memorable holidays... In amongst all that something pretty special has been happening at the #bookofblogs HQ. Over the last nine weeks researchers, practitioners, academics and bloggers have been penning their thoughts on the use of social media for research and sharing them with us.

Back in June when I wrote sometimes you have to 'just do it' and lobbed the idea of a crowd-sourced book of blogs into the Twittersphere, it wasn't without a fair bit of trepidation. Would anyone respond? What would people write about? Would we reach beyond existing bloggers and network members.

You know what, people (yes that's you!) really did respond. We've now got 40 uploaded blogs, just ten short of our target and whilst we've lost a few authors along the way (we'll miss you), we've gained others. And in keeping with our goal 'you write it & we'll publish it' the book is light on editing but packed full of fascinating insights, how to's, how not to's, opinion pieces, perspectives and personal journeys. We've got well respected academics, bloggers and first time writers rubbing shoulders with one another each bringing different perspectives & insights for us all to learn from.

It's been a brilliant effort. Thank you.

We're entering the final stages for contributions, there's a tiny clutch of blogs to arrive yet, just let us know if you need help uploading we so want to hit that 50 blog target. You can see the sheer diversity & richness of the contributions to date from this rough index:

So what's next? It's a final but crucial lap.  We're doing some organisation of the book into themes, checking it works as an ebook on different devices and then we'll be gearing up for launch. We're really hoping that we can have a proper launch party so we'll keep you posted on that but right now we need each of you to think how you can help publicise the book in the run up to launch.

Please keep watching and keep sharing, tell others about the book, let them know it's coming to an digital reader near them soon :) tweet, blog or carrier pigeon about it but please, please help us get the word out. We'll help you by providing some visual hooks and glimpses of content in the run up to the launch in late September, early October.

You've built it and now we want it to fly off the virtual bookshelf...

Exhausted, intrigued and all about social media!

Kelsey Beninger is a researcher at NatCen Social Research and can be contacted through Twitter @KBeninger.

Attending two conferences related to social media the past three days took me on a long journey, and not just from the 6 train rides, nonexistent mobile reception or from navigating my way around overly complex campus layouts! My journey also included the reflection on different approaches to talking about social media research and the need, now more than ever, to be transparent about what we do, why we do it and what is wrong with our approaches (because we aren’t perfect- it’s too early days!).

At the European Conference on Social Media in Brighton I was fortunate to meet and learn from some of the people from the 35 different countries represented. While I wont shy away from saying that I think the strongly academic focus was a wee bit theoretical for my applied social policy mind, I did learn about very different types of projects, from e-health platforms in Lithuania and online civic participation in Egypt and Malaysia, to keynotes including the evolution of social media and the feasibility of moving knowledge cafes to the online space.

The enthusiasm and excitement for social media was palpable throughout the conference and inspired hope for future innovations. I wondered, though, about how presentations I attended focused more so on the research outcome- the findings. What lacked was clarity on what means led to the end- the design and methodology. Indeed this emerged in discussions with participants who were also student supervisors. A reoccurring theme was what theory should I tell my kids to use who are wanting to use social media in their dissertation? Or, what’s the best tool, the best approach? What issues do my students need to be aware of from the beginning? There are no right answers but, yes, it would be quite handy to have an idea of the approaches, tools, considerations and adjustments researchers have used to succeed in their work so we can inform future work.

I led a roundtable on just this, one of just two roundtables in two full days of lectures. I was a bit worried there wouldn’t be dialogue but participants quickly opened up about challenges they are facing and it very much echoed the work we at @NatCen and @NSMNSS have been doing this year (see this post and this one too). Challenges of distinguishing between what is legal or allowed with research using social media brought an engaging debate amongst attendees to the roundtable. This provoked alot of discussion as some attendees initially viewed this point in black and white before the discussion turned to the grey area perceived by social media users- while T&Cs of a platform or country digital technology laws may make the use of data for research legal, the expectations of some users view it as the moral obligation of a researcher to still gain consent or anonymise data.

Also flagged up was the difficulty of defining social media (by far the most heated topic!), knowing what questions to ask to know what to do next in your design, how to sample ‘properly’ online, understanding big data collection tools and their weaknesses. Yet none of this came up in the other sessions of the day that I attended. The session may have left some people feeling at a loss for solutions and I believe that it is ok to not have a strict answer. What the session made obvious for me was the importance of researchers talking, sharing, questioning. Without more of that, then research will stagnate and researchers will get complacent.

The Research Methods Festival in Oxford was equally diverse and engaging, yet provided what I felt was missing from the ECSM2014- the methods! I presented at and attended a panel on the opportunities and challenges of social media research (See slides here) and it was so refreshing to have all people in the room be open and honest about what they can and can’t do with their research. @Donna_Peach of @SocPHD discussed how she created a community of practice on twitter and on a website, sharing examples of collaboration between different groups. The guys at CASM discussed Natural Language Processing and shared a great discrete example that even my teeny mind can comprehend! COSMOS also gave us a sneak peak of their new platform. I was intrigued about the Visual Media Lab discussed by Farida Vis, a new collaboration with the aim of tapping into the visual data online (often overlooked for the text that is more commonly the focus of research).

 Basically there is one moral to my ramblings: as a researcher don’t be afraid to bare your research design soul. Without more of that how can the field persevere and innovate, gain credibility from the skeptics and avoid reinventing the wheel?

Check out #ECSM2014 and #RFM14 twitter feeds for a roundup of both conferences.

 Papers and slides from ESRC Research Methods Festival 2014 are here: http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/RMF2014/programme/session.php?id=E8

Review the sessions at European Conference on Social Media 2014: http://academic-conferences.org/ecsm/ecsm2015/ecsm15-timetable.htm

Book of blogs - contributors update

Wow, we've been blown away by the response to our call for contributors, please see our previous post for the background to this crowdsourced project. If you've already read that and are keen to get going then here are your next steps:

• Step 1 - email us at: nsmnss@natcen.ac.uk we will then send you a link to access the contributors spreadsheet.
• Step 2 - complete the Google Doc spreadsheet with your basic information and any ideas or suggestions you have for the book, we can then send you a log in for the platform we'll be using to publish the book.
• Step 3 - get writing!
• Step 3a. - (optional) send it to us if you would like the editorial support group to provide some constructive feedback.
• Step 4 -  upload it - you're done! 

Are we uploading content ourselves then? Ideally yes, it would be really helpful if, once you have written your blog, you could upload it yourself. We are a small team & the network is currently unfunded so we have chosen a process which reduces the administrative burden and encourages everyone to play a part in the publishing process.

We're using PressBook which is akin to a communal WordPress tool this allows people to upload their own content and then enables us to publish the content as an eBook for publication on ecommerce sites like Amazon and devices like Kindle etc. If you're used to using a blogging tool like WordPress or Blogger then you should find the process familiar.

If this is your first ever blog then congratulations, we think you'll find the WSIWYG format relatively simple, you can easily cut and paste text from any word-processing package. If you hit any problems then contact us and we'll provide support.

When you log into the PressBook site you will see the following screens, choose Text from the left-hand menu and then select Add new chapter - 

 

What content can I include in my blog? 

See our previous post for the general guidance on themes and topics. 

• As an ebook you can include images, videos and web links. Please don’t link to any material that we don’t have rights for.  Videos will not routinely work in all ebook formats so consider this when selecting your content.  If you are putting video and pictures into the book please make sure you aren’t breaking the law when you are doing so! Please reference quotes and use appropriate web links or citations to credit the original creators.
• You can be as provocative as you like, but anything offensive won’t make the cut.  
• Please don’t attempt to sell or push a product or service – that is the one thing that won’t be acceptable. 
• The book needs to be accessible so remember to write for a wide audience with varying levels of technical expertise and practical experience, if you are writing about complex methodologies or philosophy include links for less experienced readers to explore other resources on the subject
• Please include a short bio (no longer than a paragraph) at the end of your chapter. You can include links to your blog, or website as you wish.

What about editing and quality control?

Anyone can contribute – there's no formal quality control – this is not a peer reviewed journal, if someone has taken the trouble to write it then we will take the time to publish it.  We want this to be packed full of different voices, some will be experienced, others not, that's fine.

We hope (and expect) that we won’t have a cut to make as we do want to publish everything that is submitted. We're assuming the average blog will be about 1000 words long – a bit longer or shorter is fine, but we won’t publish a paragraph or a long treatise – unless they are really good ;-). If we find do have to make a cut we'll talk to you all about a fair way of doing that, if we think your blog is too long or too short we will contact you about that individually.

We aren't planning on a protracted editing process but we are offering to review draft blogs and make suggestions, give constructive feedback, particularly for novice bloggers. We're looking for volunteers to form an editorial support group to provide informal feedback, so let us know if you'd be willing to play a part in that when you sign up on the spreadsheet.

What's the timescale, milestones and deadline?

• By June 30th - everyone signed up on the spreadsheet and an editorial support group formed
• By July 31st - we're aiming to have 60% of your content submitted
• August 29th is the final deadline for contributors
• End September is our provisional publication date *nervous laugh*

How can I help?

• By being as self-sufficient as possible, try uploading yourself first before asking us to do it.
• By sticking to the deadlines, if one person misses these everything gets held up.
• By being an informal editorial mentor for others, this will involve reading early drafts and offering constructive feedback
• By promoting the book of blogs to your network, we need to get the idea out to as many people as possible to both encourage contributions and to ensure wide readership come publication
• Let us know if you have ideas about where and how we should publicise and promote the book
• Please do suggest and pass on details to other potential authors and let us know possible people to write the forward to the book, it would be great to get the endorsement of someone well respected and well known - think big and outside of the box, who should we ask to introduce our work to the rest of the world?

Now is when it starts to get really interesting!

We're looking forward to hearing from you really soon.

Kandy & the #NSMNSS team

Call for contributors to A Book of Blogs – blurring the boundaries, using social media for social research

We've been thinking a lot at #NSMNSS about what types of activities the network should support next. One idea we've been ruminating on for a while is creating a volume of crowdsourced blogs on the impact social media are having on social science research methods. (We are also supporting the development of a new Sage Handbook of Social Media Research Methods which many network members will be contributing to but this is on a longer time-span and will be published in a more traditional way.)

We got the idea for this from David De Souza (@dds180) and his hugely successful HR book of blogs Humane, Resourced which topped the best seller nonfiction business charts last year. We want to try and replicate this success and believe it will be a great showcase for network members to share their experiences and views about social media research with a wider audience. The broad idea is to reach 100+ pages of content collected from a  multitude of contributors from across the social science world, in the UK and elsewhere. In the spirit of the network this will be a crowd sourced, digitally published volume.

Our best guess at the moment is approximately 50 contributors giving one blog each of 3 pages each = 150 pages of insight & personal   reflections.

The theme of the book is how are social media blurring the boundaries of conventional research methods and practice? You can write about your experiences of using social media for research, new tools or methods you've used/developed or more conceptually about the challenges or opportunities shifting methodologies present to us as researchers. Give us a case study or not... Tell us how using new approaches improved or complicated your project... how you present your ideas or reflections is up to you. We're also interested in how the research community is developing it's capacity for using these approaches so if you want to write about teaching social media methods hop on board too!
Once we can see the content coming in we'll try to organise the volume thematically.

The rules/guidelines/principles for anyone interested in contributing are below - See the following blogpost for detailed instructions on contributing - 

• It must be your own work, if you use diagrams, images they must be free to use & respect copyright. 
• You can contribute one or two blogs. No more. We're hoping to get to 50 blogs, more if more authors come forward.
• It can be new material or an old favourite. Just be sure to write within the overall theme. If you've already published a blog on the #NSMNSS blog or other blogs then we're happy for you to review, revise and submit an old favourite
• You don’t have to be a regular blogger, this could be your first or your hundredth blog
• You can be as provocative as you like, but anything offensive won’t make the cut.  Also you don't have to be 'fan' of digital social research, we're interested in blogs questioning these approaches too.
• You don't need to be an established 'name' we're interested in blogs from people at all stages of their research careers.
• We want the book to be interdisciplinary so don't feel constrained or excluded if you come from a non-social science background or context. We're positively encouraging blogs which look at interdisciplinary work and welcome co-authored blogs
• The book needs to be accessible so please write for a wide audience with varying levels of technical expertise and practical experience, if you are writing about complex methodologies or philosophy include links for less experienced readers to explore other resources on the subject

The book is being sponsored by the #NSMNSS network but it is a voluntary self funded project so there'll be no payment for contributions and editorial support will be limited.

We hope (and expect) that we don’t have a cut to make. We're assuming the average blog will be about 1000 words long – a bit longer or shorter is fine, but we won’t publish a paragraph or a long treatise – unless they are really good ;-) if we do have to make a cut we'll talk to potential contributors about a fair way of doing that.

We aren't planning on a protracted editing process but we will offer to review your draft blog for you and make suggestions, give constructive feedback. We're looking for volunteers to form an editorial support group to provide informal feedback, let us know if you're up for that.

The book will be self-published as a digital volume, and distributed electronically. We are planning to make a small charge for the final volume (we're thinking less than £5) any proceeds will go towards supporting #NSMNSS network events in the coming 12 months. The main focus and goal of the book is about is about sharing knowledge, showcasing some great work and not about making money. It’s about giving people a chance to express new ideas, share what they've learnt and challenge accepted orthodoxies of research practice. It’s about creating a volume of interesting perspectives from a new and developing field of social research.

How to join in? If you are interested please let us know in the comments section below or email nsmnss@natcen.ac.uk

Once you are signed up just get writing. We'll let you know more about the  process for collation in the next month, we'll collate blogs over the next eight weeks and publish within the next three months.

If something is worth doing it is worth doing quickly.

Hope to hear from you – and we're accepting proposals for titles too! Please share this widely and let your fellow researchers know, the more the merrier!

You can read more guidance for contributors here.

The #NSMNSS team

With special thanks to David for showing us the ropes and providing the initial inspiration. You can read David's blog here

New Social Media, New Social Science… and New Ethical Issues!

We held a small event on Friday 21st February 2014, our goal was to have a series of focused discussions around the ethical dimensions of social media research and to come up with a series of action points for the network to take forward. The day also included two presentations of related research by network members. You can read a a storify of the day - sfy.co/rPSZ 

We will post more about the outcomes and discussions shortly but we want to kick off by sharing links to the two reports and presentations. A team from NatCen has been researching the views of social media users on how their posted data should be handled by researchers. The findings are illuminating and will help to inform how we consider we should work with social media data in the future. You can read a post by the research team here, and then the findings here.

Now Janet Salmons introduces the research she has undertaken on what researchers need to help support their ethical practice when conducting social research online:

Our NSMNSS network has convened researchers from the UK and around the world in thought-provoking dialogue on topics related to scholarly use the Internet and social media. Recurrent matters related to research ethics demonstrate that there are many questions and concerns about how to adapt conventional guidelines to kinds of online research. In the atmosphere of collaboration and exchange NSMNSS encourages, resources are often suggested.  My curiosity led to two questions: to what extent do the resources suggested by the NSMNSS network address the concerns and questions raised by the NSMNSS network? What are the gaps and how can or should they be addressed? The report, “New Social Media, New Social Science… and New Ethical Issues!” is the result of this exploration. 

Numerous concerns and queries emerged from network discussions, classified here as seven interrelated themes:

• Participants: Issues related to online sampling and recruiting to find, screen, and select appropriate and verifiable research participants.

• Identity: Issues related to the identity, anonymity and/or privacy of the participant andthe researcher.

• Research site: Issues related to the setting for the study or source of data.

• Informed consent: Issues related to the determination of when consent is needed and what type of consent is adequate.

• Data: Issues related to user-generated content and ownership and protection of data.

• Research guidance: Issues related to the academic institutions and committees that prepare the next generation of researchers and must approve researchers’ proposals or decide whether their research is adequate for tenure or promotion.

• Methods and methodologies: Issues related to implications of social media research for the ways we think about research methods and methodologies.

The first five themes relate specifically to the designing, conducting and reporting on research. The final two themes raise larger issues for the field—a field NSMNSS members characterize as multidisciplinary.

Many of the recommended guidelines and materials offered little or no advice about online research ethics. However, a few professional societies and organizations have made the effort to either create a set of guidelines specific to research on the Internet, or have created supplementary materials that focus on how to apply that profession’s ethical standards when conducting studies online—and reporting on the findings. Examples of the latter were chosen for this review including materials from the Association of Internet Researchers(AOIR), British Educational Research Association (BERA), British Psychological Society (BPS), CASRO, European Society for Opinion and Marketing Research (ESOMAR) and Market Research Society (MRS), and Association (MRA).

As you can see, in some cases the profiled guidelines make recommendations aligned with NMSNSS network needs and in other cases they instead identify other risks and concerns.

You can read the full report here or watch the presentation below.

Please use the comment box to add your thoughts, relevant experiences, or to suggest other resources. We are also planning a Tweetchat discussion of the report on Tuesday 11th March at 7pm GMT (8am NZDT/6am AEDT/8pm CET/9pm SAST/3pm EDT/1pm MDT), so please join us ! You can read more about taking part in an NSMNSS twitter chat here.

Further Thoughts on Defining Social Media

By Janet Salmons, PhD #einterview and www.vision2lead.com

The New Social Media, New Social Science network is dedicated to an exploration of whether and how social science researchers should embrace social media. But what is “social media”? I considered this need for definition in an NSMNSS post. Subsequently we convened a Tweetchat and also offered the opportunity for input through a questionnaire. After reviewing the dialogue, comments and materials referenced, a more nuanced definition of social media is taking shape.

Helen Mara pointed to the word “social” as key in describing the scope of synchronous or asynchronous conversation possible. "Social" may refer to posts that are public (can be read by anyone) or private (exchange between people in defined group). Antonella Esposito suggested that social media refers to a “complex ecology, not just specific tools.” Some of the comments provide an almost poetic view: Chareen Snelson suggested that “Social media might be thought of as a stream of consciousness shared online,” while a questionnaire responded described “channels without gatekeepers.”

Digging more deeply, Tweetchatters and questionnaire respondents aimed to define social media by how it is used, and its characteristics. NSMNSS staff suggested that “social media is about dialogue & interaction, learning networks & collaboration.” Chareen added that “social media technologies permit or restrict the flow of ideas depending on what those technologies support. We are constrained by what social media platforms permit. Tools can vanish or change without notice during research.” A questionnaire respondent noted the potential for global exchange for “the primary purpose of expanding our virtual society.” Alternatively, one questionnaire respondent noted the potential for individuals as well: “for personal-only advantage (e.g. online back-up of research materials)”.

Joe Murphy augmented the Tweetchat with a diagram from his new book, Social Media, Sociality, and Survey Research (Hill, Dean, & Murphy, 2013). He suggested that a wide range of Information and Communications Technologies could be consider social media “as long as multiple participants are engaged.”

Based on my consideration of the network’s input, I suggest the following working definition.

The term “social media” refers to websites, online platforms or applications that allow for one-to-one, one-to-many, or many-to-many synchronous or asynchronous interactions between users who can create, archive and retrieve user-generated content. In social media, the user is producer; communication is interactive and networked with fluid roles between those who generate and receive content (Bechmann & Lomborg, 2013). Social media allows users to define and create groups, lists or circles of "friends" or "followers" who have access to content and can participate in dialogue.

Social media may include commercial social networking or user-developed sites, blogs and microblogs, photo- and video-sharing sites, chat and messaging tools, virtual social or game worlds, collaborative projects, forums and online communities, and/or crowdsourcing sites.

Feel free to use the comment feature to suggest further refinements!

References: 

Bechmann, A., & Lomborg, S. (2013). Mapping actor roles in social media: Different perspectives on value creation in theories of user participation. New Media & Society, 15(5), 765-781. doi: 10.1177/1461444812462853

Hill, C. A., Dean, E., & Murphy, J. (2013). Social media, sociality, and survey research. San Francisco: Wiley.