Blog

2021 Blog Posts

What are the risks of using social media data?

What are the risks of using social media data?

Using Social Media to Support a Range of Analysis and Visual Analysis Traditions

The analysis and visualization meeting was the last of the methodological meets in the SMR Convergence meeting series. In many ways, it was the most complex. First, analysis and visualization (even vi…

Convergence on Model Construction

The fourth meeting of our convergence team centered on challenges and opportunities related to model construction for social media research. This meeting involved researchers from seven institutions a…

What’s in a Sample? Acquiring and Preparing Social Media Data for Analysis

In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic we maintained our accelerated efforts to identify key features of social media data collection and analysis that scholars need to consider in their research. Our …

Bridging the Divide Between Computer Science and Social Science Standards for Measurement

With the modeling meeting coming up soon, it is a good time to reflect on the main takeaways from the white paper on Measurement that emerged from our meeting in September 2020. That meeting’s focus w…

2020 Blog Posts

Election 2020 – What words are defining Trump and Biden?

We are going through one of the most divisive presidential campaigns in the modern era. Both candidates and their campaigns claim catastrophe if the other were to get elected. And they are focusing on…

Preprints are the Solution, Not the Problem

Recently a reporter, writing an article on the issues of retracted preprints and this issue of non-peer-reviewed articles, wanted some comments about the use of this mechanism as a way to disseminate …

Helping Our Junior Faculty – Now Is the Time

During this time of crisis, we have seen many women emerge as strong leaders. Women have been prominent as leaders of nations and as care-leaders. Almost 80% of healthcare workers are women, and over …

Disciplinary Babble: Uniting Language Across Disciplines

The S3MC group held our first workshop about social media methodology in February. We had a fantastic group of experts come from all over the country to join us in thinking about how to converge study…

Establishing Norms for Social Media Usage in Research – We All Need to Participate

As a computer scientist, I have always been fascinated by constructing useful insight from large-scale data. When I was a junior faculty member, I wanted to design “clever” algorithms that were effici…