Social media research

On Friday I attended the exceptionally interesting and useful Social Media in Social Research Conference organised by the SRA.  You can read more about the conference highlights here in this Storify summary of the day.

Some particularly interesting points of note from my perspective were:

1.  The British Library is now harvesting UK web-domains and collected 1.30 BILLION different URLs last year.  They are aiming to curate different collections which will then be available for researchers.

2.European legislation of data protection looks like a potential challenge for us all – particularly in terms of the requirement for ‘explicit consent’ as a development from ‘informed consent’.

3. The Cosmos project is development many interesting and exciting tools that look very useful for researchers (both quantitative and qualitative) interested in exploring social media.  (Will add website link but unable to verify at the moment).

4.  Many researchers have been struggling with the limitations and issues of the various commercial services.  The limitations of Google and Twitter searches were much discussed (see Storify link above for presentation details).

5.  There was more emphasis throughout on quantitative ‘big data’ approaches but much discussion on the importance of qualitative analyses of these data.

Many thanks to those who organised and all those who presented.