Theme 2: Studying social media services
Compare Twitter and Facebook activity of politicians (or media figures) of your choice.
Use interactivity to guide your analysis
- Stromer-Galley, J. (2004). Interactivity-as-Product and Interactivity-as-Process. The Information Society, 20(5), 391–394.
- Larsson, A. O. (2011). Interactive to me - interactive to you? A study of use and appreciation of interactivity on Swedish newspaper websites. New Media & Society, 13(7), 1180–1197. http://doi.org/10.1177/1461444811401254
Write maximum of one-page report of your findings.
Theme 3: Studying web sites
- Compare the websites of three universities of your choice. Use interactity and affordances to help you in the analysis.
- Analyse one of the websites historically using archive.org services.
- Bucher, T., & Helmond, A. (2017). The Affordances of Social Media Platforms. SAGE Handbook of Social Media, (June 2016).
- Explicating Affordances: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research Sandra K. Evans, Katy E. Pearce, Jessica Vitak and Jeffrey W. Treem Version of Record online: 26 DEC 2016 | DOI: 10.1111/jcc4.12180
Write maximum of two-page report of your findings.
Theme 4: Studying algorithms and source code
Pair-activity: Compare the differences and similarities of Google search results with your computers.
Write maximum of one-page report of your findings.
Theme 5: Studying digital products
Explore Tinder, the dating platform. What type of values it presents to users? Choose a method most suitable for this task.
- Nissenbaum, H. (2005). Values in Technical Design. In C. Mitcham (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Science, Technology, and Ethics (pp. lxvi–lxx). New York: MacMillan.
- Winner, L. (1985). Do artifacts have politics? In D. MacKenzie & J. Wajcman (Eds.), The social shaping of technology (pp. 26–38). Buckingham: Open University Press.
Write maximum of one-page report of your findings.
Theme 6: (Introduction to) machine learning for social sciences
Try out IBM Watson services like Visual Recognition or ToneAnalyzer. Based on these, write a short research idea on what you could do with these tools.
Write maximum of one-page report of your findings.
Theme 7: Networks and their analysis
- Try you link ripper and examine link networks in your chosen university site.
- Pair activity: check your social networks (e.g., in Twitter or Facebook) and reflect what type of social ties you have there. How would this challenge any findings of network analysis?
- Van Cleemput, K. (2010). “I’ll See You on IM, Text, or Call You”: A Social Network Approach of Adolescents’ Use of Communication Media. Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society, 30(2), 75–85.
Write maximum of two-page report of your findings.
Theme 8: Crowdsourcing in social sciences
Think about a task or experiment you could do (a) faster, (b) more cost-efficiently with these methods. What type of experiments could you run which you could not run before?
Write maximum of one-page report of your findings.
Theme 9: Building digital research tools
What type of studies could you run which you could not run before?
Write maximum of one-page report of your findings.