Ontologically aware social media network research: Concepts and tools in event: Panel on network methods for communication research
Timothy Graham · QUT ePrints (Queensland University of Technology) · 2017
Nowadays, researchers can collect social media data relatively easily and cost-free. These data arrive highly structured and curated. For example, data from Twitter’s REST API is provided in JSON format, represents a small random sample of all data, and is temporally constrained to the past week (i.e., not historical). Constructing networks from these data imposes further structure, reflecting the kinds of entities and relational constructs that we assume as ‘real’, as well as the conclusions we derive analytically. In other words: the ontology of the network. This panel presentation focuses on concepts and tools for ontologically-aware social media network research. First, there is a discussion and brief demonstration of the ‘SocialMediaLab’ R package and its conceptual framework for collecting social media data and constructing different kinds of networks for analysis. Second, an ontologically-aware approach to social media network analysis - ‘Social Hypergraph Analysis’ (SHA) – is introduced. [with Robert Ackland]