Event overview
GOING DIGITAL
Rethinking Quant and Qual in Social Media Research
Organised by: David Moats
Presenters: Noortje Marres, Dhiraj Murthy, Brian Alleyne
Date: Monday 12 May: 10:00 – 17:00
Venue: Goldsmiths, University of London
Contact: David Moats d.moats@gold.ac.uk
There are few social science researchers today who do not at some point confront social media data or the Internet, in the course of their work. These sources of data invite us to rethink the division of labour between quantitative and qualitative methodologies: qualitative researchers can now extend their work to different scales with quantitative tools and visualisations and quantitative researchers can more easily engage qualitatively with individual cases and texts rather than only aggregates. Yet both quantitative and qualitative researchers must be wary that if this so called ‘transactional data’, if approached uncritically, can influence our research agendas in perhaps undesirable ways.
This one day interactive workshop, open to up to 15 phd students or early career researchers, will introduce participants to some of the basics of Internet research including scraping, archiving and analysing data with a focus on freely available web based tools. The program will begin with a brief welcome by Noortje Marres, convener of the Digital Sociology MA program, followed by presentations by Brian Alleyne and Dhiraj Murthy on their recent work. David Moats will then explain the capabilities and limitations of various existing tools (including the Google Scraper, Issue Crawler, Twitter Archiver and Facebook application Netvizz) with hands on exercises. Finally we will split into small groups to experiment with some of these approaches. The goal will be for students to approach digital data, and new methods with open minds but equipped with more critical faculties.
To apply, please send a brief bio and cover letter detailing the data you work with and how this workshop could aid your research, to d.moats@gold.ac.uk. Participants will be selected based on the relevance of their work to the topic of the workshop. No experience using Digital Tools is required.
Students may also be interested in a more advanced workshop the following week entitled ‘Digital Tools for Qualitative Research’ which builds on these existing approaches to propose and develop new quanti-qualitative tools.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 12 May 2014 | 10:00am - 5:00pm |
Accessibility
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