Centre for Digital Citizenship

3-6pm, Wednesday 11 May

Seminar Room (1.17), Clothworkers’ Building North

Organized by the Centre for Digital Citizenship (CdC), the Institute of Communications Studies, University of Leeds

The web offers a fertile source for social and political enquiry, giving researchers access to large amounts of naturally occurring data in digital form. However, making sense and good use of this data poses considerable methodological challenges for researchers. This seminar will explore different ways of conducting research online, including some of the latest digital methods and tools being used for social and political research.

Speakers: Professor Rachel Gibson (University of Manchester), Professor Mike Thelwall (University of Wolverhampton), and Dr Neil Benn (University of Leeds)

Chair: Dr Giles Moss (University of Leeds)

Attendance is free of charge, but please register in advance.

Profesor Mike Thelwall
The Web as Data for Social Research: MySpace, YouTube, and the Social Web

Although online media companies routinely have access to massive amounts of electronic information about their consumers’ actions, social researchers can also access and exploit huge amounts of free information about web users. This is mainly due to the explosion of Web 2.0 sites that are populated by a mass of casual participants. For instance, researchers concerned with viewer reactions to certain types of YouTube videos only have to read the video’s comments to gain insights, and people studying the impact of any news event are likely to find many relevant blogs and discussion forums containing public opinion. For researchers, there are now many free tools to download and process this kind of information on a large scale. This talk will give examples of empirical analyses of MySpace, YouTube, and blogs for issues such as gender, swearing, and the UK election leaders’ debates in order to start a discussion of the new research potentials of the web.

Professor Rachel Gibson

Content Analysis of Web Campaigns: From Brochureware to Action Centres

The focus will be on providing an overview of the methods and data that have been used to examine political campaigns online, focusing particularly on the development of content analysis for party home pages. The evolution of coding schemes will be profiled, moving from the approaches used to analyze static web 1.0 offerings of the late 1990s to the activist oriented sites, represented most clearly by MyBarackObama.com in 2008.

Dr Neil Benn
The ‘Web of Data’ as Data for Social Research: DBPedia, Data.gov.uk, and the Semantic Web

This talk will focus on some of the technical issues of analyzing user activity on the Web, where the Web is increasingly evolving from merely a Web of linked documents to a Web of linked, open data.  It will introduce recent research in the Semantic Web, in particular the Linked Data movement and recent initiatives to publish government data using W3C standards for publishing linked, open data. The talk will also highlight the potential that this trend to publish linked, open data has on the idea of digital citizenship.

Scott Wright, a visiting scholar at the Centre of Digital Citizenship from the University of East Anglia, presented a research paper earlier today on online deliberation research, entitled ‘Politics as usual? Revolution, normalisation and a new agenda for online-deliberation research’. Here’s the abstract for his paper:

The suggestion that new media might revolutionise politics persists as one of the most influential and popular discourses. There has been a burgeoning scholarly response, often framed through the polarising “revolution” and “normalisation” “schools” (Margolis and Resnick, 2000; Davis, 2009).  This article argues that the schism between revolution and normalisation has negatively influenced subsequent empirical analyses of political conversation online (and of e-democracy studies more generally). First, it will argue that scholars have failed to consider the nature of revolutionary change in any detail, tending to frame and interpret their research findings with the very technologically-determinist accounts of revolutionary change of which they are so critical. Second, it will argue that the revolution/normalisation frame has led researchers to disproportionately analyse existing political institutions and practices, often using narrow definitions of politics and normative underpinnings that simply may not be relevant in the context of new media. Finally, the article argues that the revolution/normalisation frame may have led researchers to interpret their empirical data in an unduly negative way.  Combined together the revolution/normalisation frame shapes the selection of cases, the choice of research questions and how subsequent results are interpreted – with the danger that researchers are being unduly pessimistic about the prevalence and nature of political debate online. The critique will lead to a series of suggestions about how scholars should take online deliberation research forward.