The debut MethodSpace webinar, “Methods in Action: Tackling the Tweet,” offered a number of fascinating tidbits in a wide-ranging hour that combined actual research outputs drawn from social media research with techniques and tips on how to do your own experiments. Listeners learned how there may be cultural differences in who chooses to geotag their tweets, that liberals are more likely to retweet conservatives’ messages than vice versa, and how it is that Ellen DeGeneres helped create a “black hole” in political science.
Two academics, Luke Sloan, a senior lecturer in quantitative methods at Cardiff University, and Joshua Tucker of New York University’s Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab were the webinar’s guests. Sloan has worked on a range of projects investigating the use of Twitter data for understanding social phenomena covering topics such as election prediction, tracking (mis)information propagation during food scares and ‘crime-sensing,’ while Tucker’s work in comparative political science in modern elections has led him to pioneering examinations of the nexus of political identity and online communication.
That April 13 webinar is now archived and can be watched below, and a Storify of the tweets during the live webcast appears at the bottom of this post:
http://www.methodspace.com/methods-in-action-tackling-the-tweet/