social media research: current state and future challenges
TRANSCRIPT
Social Media Research: Current State and Future Challenges
Anatoliy Gruzd @[email protected]
Associate Professor, Ted Rogers School of ManagementDirector, Social Media LabRyerson University
Social Media Buzz
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Source: Google Trends
Source: Web of Science, VOSviewer
health
computational
Source: Web of Science, VOSviewer
Source: Web of Science, VOSviewer
Source: Web of Science, VOSviewer
Source: Web of Science, VOSviewer
Popular “Pre-Social Media” Theories Applied in Social Media Research
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Note: Based on the Google Scholar counts of social media papers published since 2000
#SMSociety Themes and Publications
• 2014 Special Issue on Networked
Influence in American Behavioral Scientist
(Sage)
• 2015 SMSociety Proceedings (ACM)
• 2015, 2016 Special Issues in Big Data &
Society (Sage)
• 2016 Special Issue on Online
Communities in Information,
Communication & Society (Taylor & Francis)
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#SMSociety15 Conference Main Themes(scaled based on the number of presentations)
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Current Social Media Research Challenges:Social Media Data Stewardship
How to Access | Collect | Analyze | Preserve the Full Stream of Public Social Media Data?
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Current Social Media Research Challenges:Social Media Data Stewardship
Social Media Data + Data Stewardship - processes related to all aspects of managing social media data including
Collection Storage Analysis Publishing Reuse Preservation
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Self-collected/reported
Public APIs
Data Resellers
Current Social Media Research Challenges:Social Media Data Stewardship
Collection Storage Analysis Publishing Reuse Preservation
Current Social Media Research Challenges:The Rise of Social Bots
• Who are we studying?
• Humans or Bots?
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Current Social Media Research Challenges:Social Media Data Stewardship
Collection Storage Analysis Publishing Reuse Preservation
Credit: Nathan Lapierre
Current Social Media Research Challenges:The Rise of Algorithmic Filtering
• What are we studying?
• Human behaviour or Algorithms?
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Current Social Media Research Challenges:Social Media Data Stewardship
Collection Storage Analysis Publishing Reuse Preservation
Last update: 2013
Cost prohibitive, constraints
on data sharing outside the team
Limited scope / "Spritzer" version
of Twitter grabs
Current Social Media Research Challenges:Social Media Data Stewardship
Collection Storage Analysis Publishing Reuse Preservation
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Ethical Consideration
• What are the responsibilities of the researchers working with social media data?
• Should researchers only present data in an aggregated form to avoid linking to individual users?
• Should researchers collect informed consent from social media users even if they are working with publically available social media data?
Announcing the annual Social Media Lab short-term visiting scholar program!
Learn more at http://socialmedialab.ca/visit
Current Social Media Research Challenges
Join us at #SMSociety16 to continue addressing these and other social media research challenges!
Image Credits
• https://openclipart.org/detail/221725/social-media-tree
• https://openclipart.org/detail/221722/cloud-network
• https://openclipart.org/detail/191072/blue-robot
• https://openclipart.org/detail/216277/binary-tree
• https://openclipart.org/detail/167738/filing-cabinet-overload
• https://openclipart.org/detail/195840/responsive-design
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