Consultation – Asking consent to link Twitter data and survey data

Curtis Jessop is a Senior Researcher at NatCen Social Research where he works on longitudinal surveys and is the Network Lead for the NSMNSS network

Next year, I, along with Luke Sloan and Tarek Al Baghal, will be running an experiment on the Understanding Society Innovation Panel to look at the feasibilities and practicalities of linking Twitter and survey data in a longitudinal context, and how they can be combined to improve the quality of both.

We will be specifically focussing on how survey data can be enhanced using social media data (for example by creating new measures, validating survey estimates or improving non-response adjustments) and how social media data can be validated using survey data. However, we are aware that such a dataset has a greater potential than this, so we are also thinking about the ethics and practicalities that may be involved in making this dataset available more widely.

This will no doubt be tricky – as far as we are aware it is unprecedented to attempt to link data in this way and make it available to wider set of researchers, and it is therefore difficult to predict what issues may arise. We therefore aim to be as open as possible about these issues; this will involve documentation of the choices we make so others may learn from mistakes we may make, but we would also like to consult with the wider research community at key points in the process:

• Consent to data linkage
• Social media data collection/linking to survey data
• Data archiving

We are currently at the first stage – asking consent to link participants’ survey data and Twitter data. To an extent, by asking consent we are going beyond what many social media researchers may do, but by linking to survey data and aiming to archive, this changes the dynamic somewhat.

There are constraints to what we can do: the survey will be administered in web, telephone or face-to-face modes, so the process must work in all contexts. There is also limited questionnaire space, so we cannot add any more questions, and we also need to consider burden on the participant – a large amount of information may overwhelm and leave them less informed.

Below, I have outlined the template for the three questions we would like to ask. We are proposing to use ‘help links’ during the questionnaire to allow the participant to find out more information if they want it online, or an interviewer to answer questions in an interviewer-administered mode:

Q1 [Ask All]
Do you have a personal Twitter account?
1. Yes
2. No

Q2 [IF Q1 = Yes]
We are interested in being able to link people’s answers to this survey to the ways in which they use Twitter. We would also like to know who uses Twitter.

We will not use your tweets to identify you in any way and your Twitter information will be treated as confidential and given the same protections as your interview data. Your Twitter name, and any information that would allow you to be identified would not be published.

HELP SCREEN: What data will you collect from my Twitter account?
HELP SCREEN: What will the data be used for?
HELP SCREEN: Who will be able to access the linked data?
HELP SCREEN: What will you do to protect my data?

Are you willing to tell me the name of your personal Twitter account and for your Twitter information to be linked with your answers to this survey?
1. Yes
2. No

Q3 [IF Q2 = Yes]

INTERVIEWER: Please enter the respondent’s Twitter name here: [OPEN]

We would really appreciate any feedback you may have on what information we might include in these help links, or how we might change the question wording/ administration. If you do also have any thoughts that may not be possible in this context, they would also still be useful to hear so we can document them for others that may want to do this in the future.

If you have any suggestions, or would like to discuss this further, please do contact me at curtis.jessop@natcen.ac.uk. As we need to submit our final version of the question text to ISER by mid-September, please do try to get any comments to me by the end of August. 

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!

Picking a social media platform for research - our first Twitter chat of 2015

Missed out? Here’s the twitter feed from #NSMNSS chat on how to pick a social media platform in research

See below for the twitter feed from our first tweetchat of 2015 (Tues 3rd Feb) all about how to pick a social media platform in research.  Scroll to the bottom and work your way up to follow the conversation in the order it occurred. 

 

A summary of the 7 questions posed to those taking part is included below:

• Q1: What is a social media platform? #NSMNSS

• Q2: Which social media platforms are you using, or would like to use, in research? #NSMNSS

• Q3: Which platforms are you using to get data? #NSMNSS

• Q4: Do certain platforms lend themselves more to quantitative or qualitative approaches? 'Big data', 'small data'? #NSMNSS

• Q5: (from @jess1ecat) What difference is there in researching public data like Twitter stream cf. to group wikis & forums? #NSMNSS

• Q6: How do you handle data protection & ethical issues on different platforms? #NSMNSS

• Q7 How do we attend to our own online identities & use of social media platforms? #NSMNSS

Tweets about "#nsmnss since:2015-02-03 until:2015-02-04"

Thank you to those who joined us for the chat, it was an invaluable discussion. We hope you can join us for the next chat on Tues 3rd March 2015 5pm (UK time). All welcome! The voting poll to choose a discussion topic is here.

NSMNSS event January 12th, London: Using social media for academic work - opportunities and challenges - book now

NSMNSS knowledge exchange event: Using social media for academic work - opportunities and challenges

Following on from the successful launch of our book of blogs on social media research, we will be holding a new knowledge exchange event on January 12th at NatCen in central London with two of the blog authors sharing their experiences of using social media for research. We're delighted to be joined by Dr Deborah Lupton, Centenary Research Professor at the University of Canberra, who is making a flying visit to the UK and also by Dr Luke Sloan from the COSMOS team at Cardiff University.

As well as the two main presentations there will be an opportunity for networking, lunch and the chance for you to share your research experiences in an open space forum where you can ask for advice and input on challenges or dilemmas you may be facing with your own research projects.

A draft agenda for the event is below; places are free but limited to 25 people so please book your place by clicking this link as soon as possible. 

If you would like to share your challenges, dilemmas or experiences on your own research during the informal open space session then email Kandy Woodfield at kandy.woodfield@natcen.ac.uk. You won't need to prepare a presentation but we will ask you to talk about your research project or proposal and the issue you'd like input on for about 5 minutes.

Using social media for academic work - possibilities, benefits and risks

January 12th 2015, NatCen Social Research, 35 Northampton Square, London EC1V 0AX

10am             Arrival, tea & coffee and networking

10.30am       Using social media for academic work

Dr Deborah Lupton (@DALupton), University of Canberra

11.40am       Q&As

Midday         Open space forum

1pm              Lunch

1.45pm:         Investigating Social Phenomena Through COSMOS: A Case Study
                      of the  Horsemeat Scandal

Dr Luke Sloan, COSMOS team, Cardiff University

2.45pm:         Q&As

3pm:              Finish

Innovations in knowledge sharing: creating our book of blogs

Kandy Woodfield is the Learning and Enterprise Director at NatCen Social Research, and the co-founder of the NSMNSS network. You can reach Kandy on Twitter @jess1ecat.

Yesterday the NSMNSS network published its first ebook, a collection of over fifty blogs penned by researchers from around the world who are using social media in their social research. To the best of our knowledge this is the first book of blogs in the social sciences.  It draws on the insights of experienced and well-known commentators on social media research through to the thoughts of researchers new to the field.

Why did we choose to publish a book of blogs rather than a textbook or peer-reviewed article?

 In my view there is space in the academic publishing world for peer reviewed works and self-published books. We chose to publish a book of blogs rather than a traditional academic tome because we wanted to create something quickly which reflected the concerns and voices of our members. Creating a digital text, built on people’s experiences and use of social media seemed an obvious choice. Many of our network members were already blogging about their use of social media for research, for those who weren’t this was an opportunity to write something short and have their voices heard.

Unlike other fields of social research,  social media research is not yet populated with established authors and leading writers, the constant state of flux of the field means it is unlikely to ever settle in quite the same way as ethnography say or survey research. The tools, platforms and approaches to studying them are constantly changing. In this context works which are published quickly to continue to feed the plentiful discussions about the methods, ethics and practicalities of social media research seem an important counterpoint to more scholarly articles and texts.

How did we do it?

Step 1 – Create a call for action: We used social media channels to publicise the call for authors, posting tweets with links to the network blog which gave authors a clear brief on what we were looking for. Within less than a fortnight we had over 40 authors signed up.

Step 2 -  Decide on the editorial control you want to have: We let authors know that we were not peer reviewing content, if someone was prepared to contribute we would accept that contribution unless it was off theme. In the end we used every submitted blog with one exception. This was an important principle for us, the network is member-led and we wanted this book to reflect the concerns of our members not those of an editor or peer-review panel. The core team at NatCen undertook light touch editing to formatting and spelling but otherwise the contributions are unadulterated. We also organised the contributions into themes to make it easier for readers to navigate.

Step 2 – Manage your contributions: We used Google Drive to host an author’s sign-up spreadsheet asking for contact information and also an indication of the blog title and content. We also invited people to act as informal peer reviewers. Some of our less experienced authors wanted feedback and this was provided by other authors. This saved time because we did not have to create a database ourselves and was invaluable when it came to contacting authors along the way.

Step 3 – Keep a buzz going and keep in touch with authors: We found it important to keep the book of blogs uppermost in contributors minds, we did this through a combination of social media (using the #bookofblogs) and regular blogs and email updates to authors.

Step 4 – Set milestones: we set not just an end date for contributions but several milestones along the way tgo achieve 40% and 60% of contributions, this helped keep the momentum going.

Step 5 – Choose your publishing platform: there are a number of self-publishing platforms. We chose to use Press Books which has a very smooth and simple user interface similar to many blogging tools like Wordpress. We did this because we wanted authors to upload their own contributions, saving administrative time. By and large this worked fine although inevitably we ended up uploading some for authors and dealing with formatting issues!

Step 6 – Decide on format and distribution channels - You will need to consider whether to have just an e-book, an e-book and a traditional book and where to sell your book. We chose Amazon and Kindle (Mobi) format for coverage and global reach but you can publish into various formats and there are a range of channels for selling your book. 

Step 7 – Stick with it… when you’re creating a co-authored text like this with multiple authors you need to stick with it, have a clear vision of what you are trying to create and belief that you will reach your launch ready to go. And we did, we hope you enjoy it.

Watch a short video featuring a few of the authors from the Book of Blogs discussing what their pieces are about, here. 

Join the conversation today; Buy the e-book here!

It started with a tweet...

Kandy Woodfield is the Learning and Enterprise Director at NatCen Social Research, and the co-founder of the NSMNSS network. You can reach Kandy on Twitter @jess1ecat.


It started with a tweet, a blog post and a nervous laugh. Three months later I found  myself looking at a book of blogs. How did that happen?! Being involved in the NSMNSS network since its beginning has been an ongoing delight for me. It's full of researchers who aren't afraid to push the boundaries, question established thinking and break down a few silos. When I began my social research career, mobile phones were suitcase-sized and collecting your data meant lugging a tape recorder and tapes around with you. That world is gone, the smartphone most of us carry in our pockets now replaces most of the researcher's kitbag, and one single device is our street atlas, translator, digital recorder, video camera and so much more. Our research world today is a different place from 20 years ago, social media are common and we don't bat an eyelid at running a virtual focus group or online survey. We navigate and manage our social relationships using a plethora of tools, apps and platforms and the worlds we inhabit physically no longer limit our ability to make connections.

Social research as a craft, a profession, is all about making sense of the worlds and networks we and others live in, how strange would it be then if the methods and tools we use to navigate these new social worlds were not also changing and flexing.  Our network set out to give researchers a space to reflect on how social media and new forms of data were challenging conventional research practice and how we engage with research participants and audiences. If we had found little to discuss and little change it would have been worrying, I am relieved to report the opposite, researchers have been eager to share their experiences, dissect their success at using new methods and explore knotty questions about robustness, ethics and methods.

Our forthcoming  book of blogs is our members take on what that changing methodological world feels like to them, it's about where the boundaries are blurring between disciplines and methods, roles and realities. It is not a peer reviewed collection and it's not meant to be used as a text book, what we hope it offers is a series of challenging, interesting, topical perspectives on how social research is adapting, or not, in the face of huge technological and social change.

We are holding a launch event on Wednesday 29^th October at NatCen Social Research if you would like more details please contact us.

I want to thank every single author from the established bloggers to the new writers who have shared their thoughts with us in this volume. I hope you enjoy the book as much as I have enjoyed curating it. Remember you can follow the network and join in the discussion @NSMNSS, #NSMNSS or at our http://nsmnss.blogspot.co.uk/

The future of social science blogging in the UK

Mark Carrigan is a sociologist and academic technologist and first wrote this blog post for his blog http://markcarrigan.net/. Contact Mark on Twitter @mark_carrigan

Earlier this week, NatCen Social Research hosted a meeting between myself, Chris Gilson (USApp, @ChrisHJGilson), Cristina Costa and Mark Murphy (Social Theory Applied, @christinacost & @socialtrampos ), Donna Peach (PhD Forum,Donna_Peach) and Kelsey Beninger (NSMNSS, @KBeninger) to discuss possible collaborations between social science bloggers in the UK and share experiences about developing and sustaining social science blogs over time. We didn’t do as much of the latter as I expected, though I personally found it valuable simply to voice a few concerns I’d had in mind about the direction of academic blogging that I’d heretofore been keeping to myself for a variety of reasons. The manner in which the audience for Sociological Imagination seems to have stopped growing over the last couple of years (unless I make an effort to tweet more links to posts in the archives) had left me wondering why I’d been operating under the assumption that the audience for a blog should be growing. I realise that I’d been working on the premise that an audience is either growing or it’s shrinking which, once I articulated it, came to seem obviously inaccurate to me. Considering this also raised questions about overarching purposes which I was keen to get other people’s perspectives on: what was the website for? To be honest I’m not entirely sure. After four years, it’s largely become both habit and hobby. It’s an enjoyable diversion. It’s a justification for spending vast quantities of time reading other sociology blogs. I’m invested in it as a cumulative project, such that even if I stopped enjoying it, I’d probably feel motivated to continue. I’m still preoccupied by how genuinely global it has become, something which feels valuable in and of itself. I’ve also had enough positive feedback at this point (I never know quite how to respond when people send ‘thank you’ e-mails but they’re immensely appreciated!) that all these other factors, essentially constituting its value for me, find themselves reflected in a sense that it’s clearly valuable for (some) other people as well.

Much of the early discussion at the meeting was about the limitations of metrics. It’s sometimes hard to know what to do with quantitative metrics of the sort that are so abundantly supplied by social media. What do they actually mean? Other people have seemingly had the same experience I’ve had of being provoked by these stats to wonder about what isn’t being measured e.g. if x number of people visit a post then how many people read the whole thing, let alone derive some value from it? We discussed the possibility of qualitative feedback, which is essentially what the aforementioned ‘thanks’ e-mails constitute, as something potentially more meaningful but difficult to elicit. Are there ways to pursue qualitative feedback from the audience of a blog? Cristina and Mark described their current project aiming to use an online questionnaire to get information about how Social Theory Applied is seen by readers and how the material is being used. Are there others ways to get this kind of feedback? Perhaps I should just ask on the @soc_imagination twitter feed? I guess the thing that makes me uncomfortable is the risk of slipping into a publisher/consumer orientation, given this is a relation so well established in contemporary society – I don’t see the people reading the site as consumers and I don’t see myself as a publisher. In fact I’ve found it immensely frustrating on a few occasions when I’ve felt people adopt the mentality of a consumer with me e.g. leaving a comment that “there’s no excuse for posting a podcast with such low audio quality” or “why haven’t you fixed the broken link on this [old] post?”. While I’d like to get qualitative feedback on Sociological Imagination, particularly more of a sense of how people use material on the site if it’s for anything other than momentary distraction, I basically have no intention of doing anything other than what I want with it, as well as leaving the Idle Ethnographer as my co-editor to do the same.

We also discussed a range of potential collaborations which we could pursue in future. One of my concerns about the general direction of social science blogging in the UK is that the LSE blogs and the Conversation might gradually swallow up single-author blogs – in the case of the former, the fact they often repost from individual blogs mitigates against this but I think there’s still a risk that single author blogging becomes a very rare pursuit over time, simply because it’s difficult to sustain it and build an audience while subject to many other demands on your time. I think the likelihood of this happening is currently obscured by academic blogging becoming, at least in some areas, slightly modish, in a way that distracts from the question of whether new bloggers are likely to sustain their blogging in a climate where their likely expectations are unlikely to be met by the activity itself. I like the idea of finding ways to share traffic and I suggested that we could experiment with aggregation systems of various sorts: perhaps framed as a social science blogging directory which people apply to join, at which point their RSS feed is plugged into a twitter feed that automatically aggregates all the other blogs on the list. Another possibility would be to use RebelMouse to create what could effectively be a homepage for the UK social science blogosphere (in the process perhaps bringing this blogosphere into being, as opposed to it simply being an abstraction at present). Chris Gilson suggested the possibility of creating a shared newsletter in which participating sites included their top post each week or month, in order to create a communal mailing which profiled the best of social science blogging in the UK. Despite being initially antipathetic towards it, this idea grew on me as I pondered it on the way home – not least of all because it could be a way to connect with audiences who are unlikely to read blogs on a regular basis. However while it would be easy to create prototypes of any of these to test the concept, it’s less obvious how they would work on an ongoing basis. The latter two would require a small amount of funding and/or someone willing to take on an unpaid task. Perhaps more worryingly from my point of view as someone who goes out of my way to avoid formal meetings in general and those concerned with elaborating procedures in particular, it seems obvious to me that some filtering criteria would be required (e.g. should blogs have to be continued past a certain point to join the aggregator? should there be quality criteria and, if so, who would assess them?) to ‘add value’ but I have no idea what these would be nor do I see how they could be fairly elaborated without a long sequence of face-to-face meetings that would likely prove tedious for all concerned. Perhaps I’m being overly negative, particularly since two of the ideas were my own, but I don’t see the point of writing a ‘reflection’ post like this and not being upfront about where I’m coming from.

We also discussed the possibility of longer term collaborations. Would social science blogging in the UK benefit from something like The Society Pages and, if so, how do we go about setting it up? I cautioned against overestimating the possible benefits of the umbrella identity TSP provides but I really have no idea. We discussed whether we should talk to the editors of the site in order to learn more about their experiences. I can certainly see the value in pursuing something like this and, as with the aggregators, it has the virtue of facilitating collaboration while retaining the individual identities of the participating sites – for both principled and practical reasons, I don’t want to collaborate in a way that dilutes the identity of the Sociological Imagination. Plus, even if I did, I’d have to ask the Idle Ethnographer and I suspect she feels even more strongly about this than I do. This discussion segued quite naturally into a broader question of how to fund academic blogging in the UK – framed in these terms, my initial ambivalence about pursuing funding melted away because I’d like nothing more than to find a way to fund blogging as an activity. My experiences at the LSE suggest this might be harder than it seems but we discussed this in terms of winning money to buy out people’s time to participate in these activities. I’ve always been an enthusiast for the LSE model of research-led editorship (as opposed to the journalist-led editorship of the Conversation, which I think leads to an often sterile product in spite of the faultless copy) so I’d like it if this possibility, as a distinctive occupational role in itself, doesn’t slip out of the conversation but it’s difficult for all sorts of reasons. I think it would also be beneficial to find ways of employing PhD students on a part-time basis, either for ad hoc assignments or work on an ongoing basis, given the retrenchment of funding and the congruence between the demands of a PhD and paid work of this sort. My one worry here is that the pursuit of funding undermines what I would see as the more valuable outcome of establishing blog editorship on an equivalent footing with journal editorship – given the latter does not, as far as I’m aware, factor into workload allocations anywhere, advocating that time for blog editing should be bought out risks preventing an equivalence between these two roles which I suspect would otherwise be likely to emerge organically over time.

My sense of the key issues facing the UK social science blogosphere:  

• How to share experiences, allow practical advice to circulate and facilitate the establishment of best practice
• Finding qualitative metrics to supplement the quantitative metrics provided by blogging platforms
• Making it easier for new bloggers to build audiences and promote their writing
• Experimenting with aggregation projects to help consolidate the blogosphere and share traffic
• Finding ways to fund social science blogging (for students, doctoral researchers and academics)
• Increasing the recognition of social science blogging as a valuable academic activity
• Ensuring that social science blogging remains a researcher-led activity and doesn’t get subsumed into institutionalised public engagement schemes
• Encouraging the development of group blogs as a type distinct from single-author blogs and multi-author blogs with designated editors

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

Hard Evidence: how does false information spread online?

By Farida Vis, University of Sheffield and NSMNSS member

Last summer the World Economic Forum (WEF) invited its 1,500 council members to identify top trends facing the world, including what should be done about them. The WEF consists of 80 councils covering a wide range of issues including social media. Members come from academia, industry, government, international organisations and wider civil society.

The top three issues highlighted for 2014 concerned rising societal tensions in the Middle East and North Africa; widening income disparities, and persistent structural unemployment. Perhaps surprisingly, in tenth place was a concern over the rapid spread of misinformation online, specifically social media’s role in this. At a value of 3.35 this was seen as somewhat to very significant.

World Economic Forum

       

False information and the news

Within a number of professions, journalism being an obvious one, the spread and potential for reporting misinformation is a genuine concern. Being first to report breaking news has long been a key value for traditional media outlets. Though this may no longer hold the appeal it once had.

Now some news organisations are instead placing higher value on being right even if that means not being first in reporting a story. This is probably a result of various high-profile mistakes made recently using social media information.

On the anniversary of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, it’s worth remembering that information posted on Reddit led to the New York Post printing images of two suspects on its front page, who had nothing to do with the bombings.

Following the disappearance of Malaysia Airways flight MH370 in March, NBC news also highlighted various false reports spreading on social media, which alleged that the plane had made a safe landing.

Time-consuming verification practices make it near impossible for newsrooms to compete with social media’s speed. Online verification is increasingly important if this allows for reporting of online information that is factually correct. Trust in the source of information understandably continues to be one of the most, if not the most important asset a news organisation has.

Are internet users concerned?

While the WEF data showed the rapid spread of false information as a key trend for 2014, the 2013 Oxford Internet Survey found that trust in the reliability of online information among British internet users has changed very little in the past ten years.

More than that – and this is especially important in relation to false information and the news – users identify the internet as the most reliable source of information over television and radio (at 3.6 on average, with 5 being totally reliable).

 

 The authors note:

This stability suggests that users have learnt to what extent they can trust information online. In this light, we can see that people have a learned level of scepticism about information that can be found online, which is contrary to many expectations of people being unduly influenced by misinformation distributed online.

But even if internet users are not terribly concerned about false information, it remains an issue.

How does information spread?

False information spreads just like accurate information. Important work is being developed on the spread and circulation of online information, specifically academic and industry studies on virality. This work seeks to better understand the circumstances under which information has or may spread. What is clear is that it is difficult to isolate specific patterns, users or types of content that may result in the spreading of information online.

But some patterns do emerge. In their analysis, Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley found the role of “gatekeepers” is central to whether something goes viral or not. These gatekeepers – people who are well placed within a network to share information with others – are often old-fashioned journalists or people “in the know”. Nahon and Hemsley provide the famous example of Keith Urbahn, chief of staff of Donald Rumsfeld, former U.S. Secretary of Defense. His single tweet reporting the death of Osama bin Laden went viral before the President had been able to address the news media. This visualisation by Social Flow highlights the importance of both Urbahn and CNN’s Brian Stelter in the spread of this information.

Industry research by Face also shows that gatekeepers can be important, following on from an emotional trigger and validation by the relevant audience.

A further body of work focuses on a specific type of online content that often spreads rapidly: internet memes. Limor Shifman defines an internet meme as:

a) a group of digital items sharing common characteristics of content, form, and/or stance, which b) were created with awareness of each other, and c) were circulated, imitated, and/or transformed via the internet by many users.

When it comes to memes, the idea of “false information” takes on a very different meaning compared to how journalists may verify online information.

Take for example the incident of a police officer seemingly casually pepper spraying a group of Occupy protesters at a University campus in late 2011. While this incident did take place it also gave birth to a popular meme. This meme shows the police officer photoshopped in a series of art works as well as well as other contemporary and historical settings. So while the original information is accurate, its further treatment turns it into something else.

With the rapid development of platforms like Twitter, these different types of content (and different types of users, including fake and spoof accounts) all exist in the same place and can relate to the same event, which adds complication.

How do we know it’s false?

When it comes to verifying information online, journalism could be seen as a type of frontline service in dealing with false information online. Initiatives such as the Verification Handbook offer important insights and guidelines about how to deal with different types of false information. It essentially encourages readers to assume online information is false until verified.

Understanding the spread of false information online requires a better understanding of two things. First, how information spreads online; second, what we mean by false information.

In this emergent field of study we need solutions that not only help us to better understand how false information spreads online, but also how to deal with it. This requires different types of expertise: a strong understanding of social media combined with an ability to deal with large volumes of data that foreground the importance of human interpretation of information in context.

Hard Evidence is a series of articles in which academics use research evidence to tackle the trickiest public policy questions.


Farida Vis is affiliated with the World Economic Forum. She sits on the Global Agenda Council on Social Media.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.

Read the original article.