Innovations in Digital Research Methods. Группа авторов
costs. Joe’s recent work has been centred on data sources and techniques such as Internet search patterns, social media data analysis (e.g., Twitter), data visualization, crowdsourcing, and social research in virtual worlds.Oliver O’Brienis a Research Associate and software developer at UCL CASA. He investigates and implements new ways of visualizing spatial data, as part of the Big Open Data Mining and Synthesis (BODMAS) project led by Dr Cheshire, including mapping datasets from the census. His research interests include online web mapping, digital cartography, spatial analysis and data visualization, focusing particularly on transport data and London. Oliver’s Bike Share Map, a product of ongoing research into the field, shows a live map of bicycle sharing systems for around a hundred cities (http://bikes.oobrien.com/.) He co-authors the Mapping London website (http://mappinglondon.co.uk/), which regularly features good examples of maps created of and for London, from CASA and from the online community in general.Ben O’Loughlinis Professor of International Relations and Co-Director of the New Political Communication Unit at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is specialist advisor to the UK Parliament’s soft power committee. He is co-editor of the Sage journal Media, War & Conflict. His last book was Strategic Narratives: Communication Power and the New World Order (Routledge, 2013). Ben has recently completed a study with the BBC on international audience responses to the 2012 London Olympics. Ben tweets as @Ben_OLoughlin.Rob Procteris Professor of Social Informatics in the Department of Computer Science, University of Warwick, where he is deputy head of department and research director of the Warwick Institute for the Science of Cities (WISC), and Exchange Professor, NYU. Previously, he was research director of the ESRC National Centre for e-Social Science, where he contributed to developing innovations in e-Infrastructure, tools and methods in the social sciences. One focus of his current work is methodologies and tools for big social data analytics. Rob led a multidisciplinary team working with the Guardian/LSE on the ‘Reading the Riots’ project, analysing tweets sent during the August 2011 riots. This won the Data Visualization and Storytelling category of the 2012 Data Journalism Awards and the 2012 Online Media Award for the ‘Best use of Social Media’. He is also a co-founder of the Collaborative Online Social Media Observatory (Cosmos), a multidisciplinary group of UK researchers building a platform for social data analytics. Rob is editor of the Health Informatics Journal and advisory board member, Big Data and Society Journal.Kingsley Purdamis a lecturer in Social Statistics at the University of Manchester. His main area of research is in equality issues, citizen engagement and policy making. Specific areas include: governance and human rights as well as research methods in consulting hard-to-reach and vulnerable groups. He is developing an international reputation for his work on helping behaviours and also on what is termed citizen social science. He is presently conducting a scoping study into food rights and food insecurity in the UK with the support of Manchester City Council. He is also using social media data to conduct research on the relation between politicians and the electorate. Kingsley recently completed an ESRC funded review of new data types and methods. As applicant/co-applicant Kingsley has secured and delivered nearly £1.5 million of research funding across more than 50 challenging research projects, often for government departments. He teaches at postgraduate and undergraduate level on social statistics including using social media data in social research.Flora Roumpaniis a PhD researcher at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis and holds a diploma in Architecture and Engineering from the Department of Architecture in the University of Patras, and an MRes from UCL. During her studies, she worked as a researcher in the Laboratory of Urban and Regional Planning on research projects relating to urban analysis and visualization. For four years, Flora worked as an architect as part of the urban planning team in Doxiadis Associates in several projects in Greece and abroad. Her research interests include issues concerning the future of the city, virtual environments and urban modelling and these are reflected in her blog (http://en-topia.blogspot.co.uk/.)Mike Savageis Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics where he is also Head of Department, having previously been a professor at the Universities of Manchester and York. He has longstanding interests in the historical sociology of social class and stratification, where his recent books include Culture, Class, Distinction (co-authored) and where he has pioneered ‘cultural class analysis’. Mike’s concern to reflect on the methodological challenges to the social sciences is longstanding, and his book Identities and Social Change in Britain since 1940: The Politics of Method (2010) offers an historical perspective on this point. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and has been a visiting professor in Paris, Bergen, and North Carolina.Paul Tennentis a Research Associate in the Mixed Reality Laboratory and Horizon Digital Economy Research Institute at the University of Nottingham. His research focuses on the application and interpretation of sensor-based data in real world settings, and he has worked extensively on creating software frameworks to support the qualitative analysis of complex multimodal data. Paul was the principal developer of the Digital Replay System (DRS).Jonathan J.H. Zhu(PhD, Indiana University, 1990) is a professor and Founding Director of the Web Mining Lab (http://weblab.com.cityu.edu.hk) in the Department of Media and Communication at City University of Hong Kong, where he teaches new media theory, quantitative research methods, and social network analysis. Jonathan’s current research focuses on the structure, content, use, and impact of the Internet, with results published in Communication Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, New Media & Society, Cyberpsychology, Behavior and Social Networking, Information, Communication, and Society, Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, Computers in Human Behavior, IEEE Transactions in Visualization and Computer Graphics, and elsewhere.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all those who contributed to the achievements of the National Centre for e-Social Science (NCeSS). We would like to express our special thanks to the NCeSS Hub team: Mercedes Arguello, Marzieh Asgari-Targhi, Kenny Baird, Lisa Bell, Laura Bond, Hazel Burke, Keith Cole, Mike Daw, Elaine Edwards, Pascal Ekin, June Finch, Morag Goff, Terry Hewitt, Wei Jie, Farzana Latif, Yuwei Lin, Katy Middlebrough, Frank O’Donnell, Elisa Pieri, Meik Poschen, Tian Qui, Tobias Schiebeck, Gillian Sinclair, Richard Sinnott, Colin Venters and Alex Voss.
Companion Website
This book is supported by a brand new companion website (https://study.sagepub.com/halfpennyprocter.) The website offers a wide range of free learning resources, including:
Chapter summaries
Links to online sources listed in each chapter
Links to demos, slides and videos
Links to current research.
1 Introduction and Overview
Peter Halfpenny
Rob Procter
1.1 Introduction
The dramatic increase over the last two decades or so in computing power, in wired and wireless connectivity, and in the availability of data has affected all aspects of our lives. Our aim in this book is to provide an accessible introduction to how social science researchers are harnessing innovations in digital technologies to transform their research methods. In this chapter we provide an overview of how and why e-Research methods have emerged, including an account of the drivers that have motivated their development and the barriers to their successful adoption. The chapters that follow examine how innovations in digital technologies are enabling the emergence of more powerful research infrastructure, services and tools, and how social science researchers are exploiting them.
1.1.1 Digital Data
As everyone exposed to the Internet is aware, the amount of digital data available is expanding very rapidly, both through the digitization of past records and by