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!

 

Share your ideas for tweetchat topics in the new year!

Do you have a burning question about social sciences and social media? Want to learn something specific from our cross-country, cross-discipline members? Now is your chance!

We are thinking ahead about the topics of our monthly tweetchats for 2015. Let us know in the comments what you want to discuss and learn more about and we will expand on the idea by coming up with questions to pose to the network to discuss.

Looking forward to your thoughts!

Missed out? Read the twitter feed from our chat on changing role of researchers in a social media world

See below for the twitter feed from our tweetchat on 9th December 2014 all about the changing role of researchers involved in online and social media research. Scroll to the bottom and work your way up to follow the conversation in the order it occured.

A summary of the 5 questions posed to those taking part is included below:

Q1: How is social media impacting upon you as a researcher? E.g. identity, work/life balance, ethics
Q2: How is social media changing our identities as researchers?
Q3 from @einterview: How does insider-outsider position influence your role, identity,access or objectivity?
Q4 from @newbiephd: What does it mean to be ‘virtually ethical’?
Q5: What are the key issues around social media for researchers going forward?
Q6: What topics shall we chat about on #NSMNSS in the new year?

Tweets about #nsmnss since:2014-12-09 until:2014-12-10

Save the dates! Upcoming tweet chats

There have been lots of interesting discussions and topics floating around about new social media in the social scienes. What better way to share than to host some tweet chats! See below for the dates and the topic we will cover for each tweet chat. All times are London time.


Tuesday 7th October, 2014 at 5pm: Representativeness of online samples

Including: What are the geographical inequalities in contributions across different social media platforms? What approaches can we take to address this? How can we weight twitter data? How can we learn about demographics of people on social media, such as age, gender, employment?


Monday 17th November at 5pm: Ready, set, research!: accessing funds and data

Including: You have an idea for a study, how do you go about funding it? What funding streams are available? What are the regulations/restrictions of accessing different streams? How do we get our hands on big data sets from the likes of Google and Twitter?


Tuesday 9th December at 5pm: The changing role of researchers of SM

Including: How is social media changing our identities as researchers, as people? How does this effect our work? How does this impact the field of social sciences?


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.

Catch up on our latest tweetchat with our Storify

We had a Twitterchat on 8/5/14 ably hosted by Janet Salmon a.ka. @einterview. The chat focused on how we can engage students with reflective practice for online qual research and covered a range of issues. Our now annual 'time zone confusion' moment happened when the UK moves over to summertime but we advertise the tweetchat at GMT so huge apologies if you were hoping to join in only to find the chat had started 60 minutes before. Thanks to Janet for staying online to pick up discussions with people turning up at the later session. And a final thanks to @jennacondie who quietly goes about running the #NSMNSS Twitter account and managed during this chat to contribute both as facilitator and participant, well impressed. 

See you all soon. And don't forget you can keep up with news and events by following #NSMNSS and @NSMNSS

Read all about what you missed on Storify, here: https://storify.com/jess1ecat/nsmnss-twitter-chat-may-8th-2014

Why I love online interview research

Janet Salmons is a network member and a contributing expert to the online team. 

There are nearly as many kinds of research approaches as there are questions to study. While it is the task of the researcher to match approach to question, it is clear that some researchers simply prefer one approach over another, and select types of questions that permit them to carry out the inquiry in the preferred way. I admit it, I am guilty. While I see the value in all sorts of studies, I would not be content to crunch Big Data, even if it meant I could generate impressive maps and diagrams. I want to learn about their experiences first hand. I want to know why. Why did you make that choice and not another, why was it important to you, why do you plan to do things differently in the future? I cannot ask an extant mountain of Big Data to tell me more.

Online interviews allow researchers to pose questions in a variety of ways with participants anywhere, at any time. In synchronous interviews we can capture the immediacy and emotion of the moment, and when we click on the webcam to video conference we can have a dynamic exchange that is close to being there in person. We can traipse around a virtual world together or share a desktop or application, and discuss what we are experiencing. Or we can use a whiteboard to diagram and draw perceptions of the phenomena. With flexible asynchronous emails we can create an extended narrative correspondence or text message on the go, and ask participants to share their observations on site-- perhaps even relaying pictures or maps back to us.  It can be a rich exchange!

And yet, as always in scholarly research there are more issues and requirements to be considered including rigour, ethics, and methodological alignment. There is also the all-important acceptance by dissertation chairs and ethics boards, editors and peer reviewers. To add to the challenge, many of those who would hold the study’s fate in their hands are not familiar or comfortable with online methods.

Resources and upcoming events

To help researchers navigate these matters and create well-designed, coherent studies that merit approval, I have been focusing my attention on the development of design approaches for online interview methods. I created the “E-Interview Research Framework,” a holistic, systems-thinking set of guiding questions and models (Salmons, 2012, 2015). My new book from Sage Publications, Qualitative Online Interviews, is organized using this Framework.

To celebrate the May book release I am organizing an interactive, global online multi-platform extravaganza of free webinars, discussions and tweetchats about using e-interviews in research and teaching online methods. In addition to NSMNSS, SCoPE, e/merge Africa and IT4All are offering opportunities to learn together and exchange ideas. You are invited!

SCoPE, an online community interested in technology, educational research and practice, will host events from May 1 to 16, and additional events will be offered throughout the summer. Visit SCoPE at http://bit.ly/1i7W73j for free registration, webinar log-in information and related resources. Follow @einterview for updates.

Save the dates

Asynchronous Discussion Forum May 2-16:

·         Teaching Digital Qualitative Interview Methods

·         Designing an (Approvable) Study with Digital Qualitative Interview Methods

·         Open Discussion and Q & A

Webinars, May 5 and 12, and June 7:

·         Monday, May 5, 2014 at 17:00:00 Fair and Good? Ethics and Quality in Online Interview Research

·         Monday, May 12, 2014 at 17:00:00  See, Share, Create: Visual E-Interviews

·         Saturday, June 7, 2014 at 15:00 Online Interviews for Active Online Learning

NSMNSS Tweetchat, May 8:

·         Thursday, May 8, 2014 at 14:00:00  5 Tips for Teaching E-Interview Methods. Follow @NSMNSS and include #NSMNSS in all your tweets.

e/merge Africa Events,
July 21-25: Details TBA

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.

What Social Media means to my research

By Amy Aisha Brown, PhD Blogger

After reading Dr Janet Salmons’s last post (Defining our terms: What is “social media”?), I was inspired to think about what the term means to me but coming up with a definition is not that easy. Is social media defining platforms, the affordances of platforms, something else? Is it the online factor? Because it is participatory? How far does the label extend? I am excited about the #NSMNSS tweetchat we are going to have on 5 December (details here) where we can discuss some of these questions and think about what social media means to us as a group, but after failing to find a personal definition for this potentially all-encompassing term, I thought a better approach might be for me to think about what social media means or brings to my doctoral research.

On a basic level I could say, “social media is data”. That is, I use Twitter as my way into investigating how the English language in Japan is talked about. This is not a common approach in studies of language ideology, but Twitter has a massive active user base (around 10% of the Japanese population if recent statistics from in the loop are accurate), and tweets are both accessible and plentiful. In fact, tweets in Japanese mentioning the English language are so numerous that it is impossible for me to collect them all—a matter for another time. But while these features show the potential of Twitter to collect a vast amount of potentially relevant data, what is it that makes Twitter, as opposed to some other source of information, useful for undertaking my investigations?

I could have chosen to look at how the English language is talked about in Japanese newspaper reports, policy documents, or organisational websites, or used interviews or focus groups. However, what previous studies using these techniques have yet to focus on is how English is talked about across domains, from the mass media, to business, through to daily conversation. And it is at this point that Twitter comes in.

Until recently Twitter’s about page claimed it to be “a real time information network”, and the phrase still appears elsewhere on the site. However, Twitter is not just news and information, it is also a social space where people interact, comment, and chat. This social side of Twitter means that I can look at how ‘official’ information sources (newspapers, organisations, etc) talk about English and how people talk about English in response to those sources, but I can also take into consideration how it is talked about in wider conversation, something that would be near impossible using other kinds of data.

So, for me, the massive user base of Twitter and the online, real-time, accessibility of it cannot be underestimated, but what is really important is the social, collaborative, participatory side of Twitter that enables the talk about my topic (and pretty much any other) to thrive.

Twitter chat transcript - quality of social media research

Thanks to everyone who joined us on Twitter to discuss issues related to data and analysis quality arising from social media research - it was great to have a range of people involved. If you weren't able to make it, or if you want to take another look at what was said, the transcript is available after the jump - scroll to the bottom and work your way back up..

Reserve your spot now! Final Knowledge Exchange Seminar on 15 March

Dear NSMNSS members,

We're delighted to invite you to the next set of free NSMNSS network activities:

■  We will be holding our final Knowledge Exchange Seminar, hosted at NatCen Social Research on 15 March at 35 Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0AX.

This half day session (12.30-4.30pm) will focus exclusively on the issues related to data and analysis quality arising from social media research, please see the programme copied below for more details. We have very limited spaces for this event so places will be allocated on a first come first served basis and preference will be given to participants willing to contribute a case study or example from their own experience to one of the sessions.  If you would like to attend the seminar please contact us (see below) confirming your contact details (email and phone number). We would hope attendees are able to share their experiences throughout the day of quality issues they have faced using social media.

■  Although the Seminar is free, space is limited; if you do not attend after reserving a place we will make an administrative charge to cover the costs of catering and administration. Please only reserve a space if you intend to attend.

■  In the next couple of weeks we will host the latest in out series of hour long NSMNSS tweetchats related to the issues for discussion in the seminar (follow the hashtag #NSMNSS to participate).

Our Knowledge Exchange Seminars provide an opportunity for researchers, practitioners and policy-makers to share ideas. Each of the four sessions will be interactive, with lots of opportunity for open discussion. We are asking for network volunteers to help deliver the day. You can volunteer to:

■  Tell us about your experiences by providing a descriptive case study– a short 2-3 minute description of an ethical issue or concern that you have encountered in your social media research. Please identify which of the suggested themes in the programme you think your example would fit under and we will ask you to share this during the relevant session, in advance via a blog or on the day with a video blog.

If you would like to contribute to the event on 15^th March please reply to Kelsey Beninger on kelsey.beninger@natcen.ac.uk by 1^st March giving details also of whether and how you would like to contribute. If you would like to contribute a blog or case study, please also include what session your experience relates to.

A live stream of the event will be available, if you are unable to join us please share your thoughts and insights with tweets and comments on our Methodspace forum before and after the event. Remember you can join in network activities here at any time: http://www.natcen.ac.uk/nsmnss/

For a map to NatCen Social Research, please click here.

  

With thanks from the NSMNSS network team.

-------------------------------------------

Blurring the Boundaries - new social media, new social science?

Knowledge Exchange Seminar 4 |
Quality in Social Media Research

15^th March 2013, NatCen Social Research
35 Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0AX

12.30pm	Arrival and lunch
1.00pm	Session 1
	Augmenting curated data with twitter feeds	■     Dr. Luke Sloan, COSMOS, Cardiff University
1.50pm	Session 2
	Practical and epistemological challenges of online research	■     Antonio Casilli, Telecom ParisTech
2.40pm	Break
3.00pm	Session 3
	Depth or disinhibition? What is social media data telling us?	■     Stephen Webster, NatCen Social Research
3.50pm	Session 4
	Draw together key messages for quality	■     Led by NSMNSS
4.30pm	Close and next steps

Twitter chat transcript - qualitative methods

The latest transcript from our series of twitterchats, this time on qualitative research and new social media. If you couldn't make it, or if you did, but missed out on a link or snippet, the transcript is available after the jump. 

Thanks to everyone who joined - and apologies for the lateness in posting! 

Policy, practice and new social media tweetchat - transcript

We ran our second tweetchat yesterday on whether new social media can make an impact on policy and practice. We had a good discussion with some great points and resources being shared. You can see the entire transcript from the tweetchat after the jump.

Making an impact on policy and practice with social media research – exciting news about our next tweet chat

We have decided to run a monthly tweet chat following the success of our first chat at the end of July.

Our next chat will be held on Wednesday 29th August 5-6pm BST and the topic will be how we can ensure that the research we conduct using social media is being understood, appreciated and used by stakeholders and decision makers in policy and practice.

We hope you can join us on Twitter, just follow the #NSMNSS to join in. Read our earlier blog for more detailed guidance on taking part in a tweet chat.

Gareth Morrell, Senior Research Director at NatCen Social Research, has posed a set of interesting questions for us to address during the chat so please get your thinking hats on and spread the word!

The questions:

Q1. How can social media data help to inform policy and practice?

Q2. How can researchers engage better with policy and practice on this issue and vice versa?

Q3. Is there an appetite for using this data among policy-makers and practitioners?

Q4. What concerns do stakeholders in policy and practice have about these new methods?

We will continue the discussion after the chat on our Methodspace pages and are looking to compile a series of case studies and lessons learnt by network members from their experiences of making use of social media platforms and methods for applied policy research.

The tweet chat, and the examples we gather, will help us in building a picture of how new social media research is being adopted or used in policy and practice and will contribute to an additional event that the NSMNSS team are planning with NESTA around how useful new social media methods might be to applied policy research in the future. This will be a great opportunity to demonstrate the value of these new approaches and methods to research commissioners from a broad range of organisations so we will really value your input.

You can read the transcript from our first tweet chat here.

Kandy Woodfield

What’s all this about a tweet chat?

New Social Media, New Social Science? is an online and offline community of practice exploring how social media are affecting the way we conduct social research and interact with research participants.

Tweet chats are simply pre-arranged virtual conversations, usually with a facilitator, around a theme and grouped around a single #hashtag. They are a quick and easy way to engage a number of people who share a common interest or challenge.

Our tweet chats are an opportunity for members from different countries to take place in a real-time discussion of the key issues, help frame the agenda for network and share real-life experiences of researching in the digital age. We will be holding a tweet chat the week before each of our face to face events and may host more if the group feels they are a useful medium. Each tweet chat will have a theme for the network to explore and this will help shape the issues covered by the network over the course of the year.

Our first tweetchat will take place 4-5pm (BST) on 17th July 2012. Join us by following #NSMNSS.

Read the next blog for information about how to join the chat.