Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda & Katrin Weller. Presentation at Web Science Conference (WebSci '14), Bloomington, Indiana. 25.06.2014

1. The Role of Interdisciplinary Work in
Social Media Research
Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda & Katrin Weller
GESIS – Leibniz-Institute for the Social Sciences
Data Archive for the Social Sciences
Unter Sachsenhausen 6-8, 50667 Köln, Germany
{katharina.kinder-kurlanda | katrin.weller} @gesis.org
“I Always Feel It
Must Be Great to
Be a Hacker!”

2. 2
SELF-REFLECTION

3. “to me if you are not doing
something that is interdisciplinary
you are not doing web science“
Wendy Hall, Keynote at WebSci ‘14
3
Challenge: But how to make interdisciplinarity happen?
 This is our contribution to this ongoing challenge

4. We interviewed researchers studying social media
– Methods, objectives & challenges when dealing with social
media data
We started with researchers with social science
backgrounds
Interdisciplinarity turned out to be of major concern
4
Our study

5. Overall conclusion
Interdisciplinary collaborations, especially with
computer scientists, are of high importance for social
media researchers from the social sciences
…AND they showed a high level of reflection of
challenges and opportunities
5

6. Our approach
• Qualitative semi-structured interviews
• Exploratory design to allow for unexpectedness
• Theory building occurs in parallel to experiences in the
‘field’
• Established qualitative approach in the social sciences
(please join us later if you have questions about our
method)
6

7. Interview partners
• 20 interviews at a major international internet studies
conference
• Social media researchers from the social sciences
– researchers working with social media data identified from the
program
• various countries, professional levels and experiences
7

8. Findings
Interdisciplinarity is of high importance for social media
researchers from the social sciences…
With regards to:
1) Researchers‘ careers
2) Research methods, approaches and potential
findings
3) Practical issues in the everyday work
8

9. 1. ABOUT SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCHERS
FROM THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
9

10. Social media researchers are already
interdisciplinary
• Knowledge or training in various disciplines, mix of
methods and theories
• They operate on the fringes of their ‘home’-discipline
• They often challenge disciplinary boundaries &
studies may not fit into mainstream social science
publications
• Social media research as a social scientist can be
challenging and even risky
• Nevertheless: General sense of excitement about
working in an interesting area
10

11. 2. ABOUT THE ROLE OF
INTERDISCIPLINARITY IN SOCIAL
MEDIA RESEARCH
11

12. Social media research needs to be
interdisciplinary
We found a strong belief that social media research
was inherently interdisciplinary and also needed to be:
• More options to tackle material, methods,
perspectives & theory
• ‘See more’ and obtain different results
• Belief that new fields require an open mind and
should not be limited by disciplinary boundaries or
strict standards
Methodological level
12

13. Computer scientists’ skills are valued in social
media research
– Longing for the “productive tension” of negotiating
methods
– Working with social media data requires different
skills & tools than social scientists are used to
working with
– Approaches from computer science can help to
address new research questions
13

14. Social media research needs collaboration
• It is becoming difficult to obtain meaningful results
as a single researcher
• Data collection was seen as time-intensive and
difficult, which resulted in having to ‘outsource’ parts
of projects
• Interdisciplinary projects & a delegation of roles were
common:
– data collection, literature review, theory building, data
analysis required many people
Practical level
14

15. 3. ABOUT PRACTICAL CHALLENGES
IN SOCIAL MEDIA RESEARCH
15

16. Critical reflection of one’s skills as a social scientist
• A strong desire to acquire new technical skills
– Limits of research opportunities, e.g. limited options for
data collection
16
“Yeah, I always feel it must be great to
be a hacker because you can get hold of
all these great datasets.”
Social media researcher from Europe,
PhD student, Media & ICT

17. Different reactions
• Some had already started to learn new methods and
skills, e.g. programming, statistics
• Others were aware that this was too time-consuming
and would not leave enough time e.g. to focus on
theory building and literature review
17
Possible solution: Interdisciplinary
projects with computer scientists

18. A role for computer scientists?
• Often: Reducing the roles of computer scientists to
those of ‘mere’ data collectors
• Solves the ‘skills problem’ but was seen as
problematic
• Interviewees realized that computer scientists had
their own research agenda and that often the tasks
that social scientists required were not interesting to
them
18

19. “They can’t publish results on the things we
need from them. Like collecting data or creating
something to collect data. We collaborated with
(...) experts in databases. And it was very
difficult to find something that was useful also
for them under the academic point of view.”
Social media researcher from Europe,
Assistant Professor,
Communication & Humanities
19

20. Analysis: Division of roles
• Computer scientists’ role as ‘mere’ data collectors
also originated in computer scientists’ view of social
scientists as end users, that they needed to provide a
technical solution for…
• …as opposed to collaborators in challenging
traditional paradigms and methods
20

21. Analysis: Overlaps & differences
• Overlaps: Interest in the same data
• Differences: Methods, standards & expectations of results
• Differences become critical when decisions about data
collection and analysis are made: Data needs to be useful for
all collaborators
• Ideas about methodology & epistemology (e.g. validity of
data) need to be negotiated and allowed to co-exist
21

22. Analysis: Success stories
• Interdisciplinary work needs open minds and
constant discussions
– Share and discuss expectations about derivation,
validity and explanatory power of the data
– Explore new methods, experiment with different types
of data (big, small…)
22

23. 23
I’m trying not to be in a
specific discipline, on the
contrary. (…) Actually I’m
objecting to the idea of
putting me in a specific
discipline.
It seems very hard, or nearly
impossible, to do this kind of
stuff in the future as a single
or individual researcher.
I think this research has brought us into
contact with people from computer
sciences and other disciplines like that
more.
The road ahead
• ““I love thinking about
ethics!” Perspectives
on ethics in social
media research” @
IR15 conference
• More interviews
• Other aspects, e.g.
epistemology
My questions
are limited to
what I can do.

24. Questions and Feedback:
Dr. Katrin Weller
katrin.weller@gesis.org
@kwelle
http://katrinweller.net
Dr. Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda
katharina.kinder-kurlanda@gesis.org
@ka_kinder
http://www.gesis.org/sdc