Social Media, Organizations, and Academic Research
This is a series of iPython notebooks for analyzing Big Data — specifically Twitter data — using Python’s powerful PANDAS (Python Data Analysis) library. Through these tutorials I’ll walk you through how to analyze your raw social media data using a typical social science approach. The target audience is those who are interested in covering […]
You want to download and analyze “Big Data” — such as messages or network data from Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. But you’ve never done it before, and you’re wondering, “Do I need to learn computer programming?” Here are some decision rules, laid out in the form of brief case studies. One-Shot Download with Limited […]
Including a hashtag in a social media message can increase its reach. The question is, what is the ideal number of tags to include? To answer this question, I examine 60,919 original tweets sent in 2014 by 99 for-profit and nonprofit member organizations of a large US health advocacy coalition. First, the following table shows […]
One of the core tenets of scientific research is replication. This gets at the reproducibility standard of scientific research. Despite calls for more replication in the social sciences, replication studies are still rather rare. In part, this is the product of journal editors’ and reviewers’ strong preferences for original research. It is also due to […]
Being Director of Graduate Studies gives me plenty of time to reflect on what I’d like students to get out of graduate education. For budding academics, you have all likely heard (countless times!) that the ultimate “deliverable” is high-quality journal articles. Of this there is little doubt — at least in the fields I’m familiar […]
The research I’ve done on organizations’ use of social media suggests there are three main types of messages that organizations send on social media: informational, community-building, and “action” (promotional & mobilizational) messages. Each type constitutes a different way of engaging with the intended audience: Informational messages serve to inform — about the organization’s activities or […]
