Group items tagged

Woodfield, Kandy and Morrell, Gareth and Metzler, Katie and Blank, Grant and Salmons, Janet and Finnegan, Jerome and Lucraft, Mithu (2013) Blurring the Boundaries? New social media, new social research: Developing a network to explore the issues faced by researchers negotiating the new research landscape of online social media platforms. NCRM Working Paper. "On a practical level, some of our network members were struggling with the constant stream of social media data, finding it difficult to keep pace with their participants as they moved on in their conversations and discussions. Digital overwhelm might become counter-productive to reflective social science if researchers are not skilled at managing data flows. Similarly, gathering massive datasets requires a computing power outside of the grasp of many independent researchers or students. The increasing emphasis on 'big data' runs the risk of access to datasets being increasingly concentrated in the hands of a tiny minority of researchers and organisations. An alternative perspective sees this as an opportunity for researchers to come together in creative, cross-disciplinary collaborations, Either way, social researchers will need to find ways of convincing those who own social media sites about the merits of extending, or at least continuing, some freely accessible datasets. The politics of social media research will become an increasingly important agenda for social scientists to engage with. Despite the strengths that social media offer in terms of providing an accessible platform for some marginalised groups, other hard-to-reach populations like the elderly, the poor and those with limited literacy remain more difficult to reach online." Page 12