New methodologies for the digital age? How methods (re-)organize research using social media data

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dc.contributor.authorFan, Yangliu
dc.contributor.authorLehmann, Sune
dc.contributor.authorBlok, Anders
dc.date.accessioned2024-05-02T15:06:25Z
dc.date.available2024-05-02T15:06:25Z
dc.date.issued2023
dc.description.abstractAs “big and broad” social media data continues to expand and become a more prevalent source for research, much remains to be understood about its epistemological and methodological implications. Drawing on an original data set of 12,732 research articles using social media data, we employ a novel dictionary-based approach to map the use of methods. Specifically, our approach draws on a combination of manual coding and embedding-enhanced query expansion. We cluster journals in groups of densely connected research communities to investigate how heterogeneous these groups are in terms of the methods used. First, our results indicate that research in this domain is largely organized by methods. Some communities tend to have a monomethod culture, and others combine methods in novel ways. Comparing practices across communities, we observe that computational methods have penetrated many research areas but not the research space surrounding ethnography. Second, we identify two core axes of variation—social sciences vs. computer science and methodological individualism vs. relationalism—that organize the domain as a whole, suggesting new methodological divisions and debates.
dc.description.sponsorshipThe Lab has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement no. 759681). The paper has been written with the support of a Fellowship grant at the Weizenbaum Institute, Berlin.
dc.identifier.citationFan, Y., Lehmann, S., & Blok, A. (2023). New methodologies for the digital age? How methods (re-)organize research using social media data. Quantitative Science Studies, 4(4), 976–996. https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00271
dc.identifier.doihttps://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00271
dc.identifier.issn2641-3337
dc.identifier.urihttps://www.weizenbaum-library.de/handle/id/645
dc.language.isoeng
dc.relation.issupplementedbyhttps://www.weizenbaum-library.de/handle/id/838
dc.relation.issupplementedbyhttps://github.com/YangliuF95/Method_embedding
dc.rightsopen access
dc.rights.urihttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subjectbig social data
dc.subjectresearch methods
dc.subjectscience studies
dc.subjectsocial media data
dc.subjectword embedding
dc.titleNew methodologies for the digital age? How methods (re-)organize research using social media data
dc.typeArticle
dc.type.statuspublishedVersion
dcmi.typeText
dcterms.bibliographicCitation.urlhttps://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00271
local.researchgroupDynamiken digitaler Nachrichtenvermittlung
local.researchtopicDigitale Märkte und Öffentlichkeiten auf Plattformen
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