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

  1. Compare the websites of three universities of your choice. Use interactity and affordances to help you in the analysis.
  2. 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

  1. Try you link ripper and examine link networks in your chosen university site.
  2. 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.