FEATURE Data management Taming Twitter
Map of the frequency with which people in different places @reply to each other on Twitter. Data from witter streaming API, May 15 through October 10, 2011
As the number of social media users sky-rockets, can researchers catch the data fallout? Rebecca Pool finds out
I 4 Research Information APRIL/MAY 2016
n September 2013, Germany held its federal election to determine the members of the 18th national parliament of Germany. All seats to the ‘Bundestag’ were at stake and Chancellor Angela Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), won a major victory.
But while the world watched election events play out, a group of social scientists were monitoring developments from quite a different perspective.
By collecting, archiving and interrogating data from Facebook and Twitter around this time, researchers from the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences were gleaning
information on how political candidates communicated through social media. At the same time, GESIS Information Scientist, Katrin Weller, was also intent on developing the best strategies to harvest, store and process data for future use. As Weller highlights: ‘Many academics from different disciplines are interested in social media data now, and many researchers turn to Twitter data as this is one of the easiest platforms to get data from.’ Today, Twitter boasts more than 300 million monthly active users with 500 million tweets per day. And for social scientists, as well as researchers from other disciplines, this goldmine
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Eric Fischer
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