I’m working with Dr Lock on the Social Media Project, and over the next two weeks, I will be updating the blog with further information about the variety of UCL staff who conduct their research using social media as a data source. This information will also include links to the wealth of articles produced on the subject at UCL.

If you are using social media platforms for data, rather than dissemination, for your research, or undertaking any research that considers social media and its impact on politics, communication, society and so on, please get in touch! You can email me here: l.richardson@ucl.ac.uk

After a brief hiatus over the summer we’re forging on with the social media project and ready to get on with doing new things.  Below are the collated results from our kick-off meeting on what areas of new research, and research questions, participants wanted to see being explored at UCL in the future.

• Database management
• Engagement on Wikipedia (case study of health)
• Private companies’ use of growing amount of web/social/public data
• Algorithms and social behavior
• Business innovation and digital technology research
• Doing anthropology/ethnography of social media companies
• Illegal logging evidence
• location mapping as social tools to support communities and inventory of indigenous resources
• social networking amongst scientists (e.g. myexperiment)
• Applied location-based social networks
• Navigability of online networks and cues to relevance of attention
• Information resources for new members
• Digital archives
• The notion of privacy in the area of social networks
• Micropublication in science
• Enterprise social networks
• Presentation of self, digital identities, ‘external’ and ‘internal’ networks
• Using mobile phones for social networks – open source software and CIC funding
• Sentiment analysis of content
• Meshwork vs. networks in social media
• Translocal solidarity on social media
• Developing a way of responding to a suicidal crisis via social media
• Impact of crowdsourced datasets (assembled by the public) on the ‘authority’ f professional academic interpretation/explanation
• Co-creation of content with community groups via social media
• Opinion mining – automatic analysis
• Digital museums and archives and social media
• Student engagement in social media for teaching
• Academic social networking
• Use of social media in UCL
• The language of social media (how they affect the way language is used)

Other questions raised in discussion

• Can UCL gain access to government open data sets?
• How can we we all share data at UCL? Can we catalogue what data already exists?
• The underlying private/corporate ownership of social media
•  The role of the user as a commodity
• What do people understand by privacy?
• How does social media affect the student body? Does it affect campus behaviour?

What do you think? Any other things we might want to research collectively? Please post any comments or thoughts.

Coming up next: let’s get some research working groups going! 

Some more feedback from our Town Meeting. Part 1 (below) asked for generic areas of research at UCL, this time we’re posting the responses to our question ‘Who is already working on social media at UCL?’ and further to this details of any specific projects.

Below represents a verbatim transcript of the feedback (our very high-tech post-it note system).

If you are listed below, or one of the comments was yours please feel free to add more context/detail in the comments below (weblinks for example)

If you are not on the list then please make yourself or your project known in the comments!

We’ll collate this into a updatable list of people and projects to go alongside our growing list of UCL publications on social media in the resources section of the blog.

People or specific departments and projects working on social media at UCL

• Tilley – Social construction of landscape
• Social Network Analysis expertise across UCL (CS CASA CEGE etc)
• Existing expertise in social media (including location-based) @ CASA
• Netnography with spanish speaking migrants – Pablo Mateos (UCL Geography)
• UCLDH – user studies and social media for public engagement
• ‘Social Stream’ – project under the UK PhD Centre in Financial computing (Ilya Zhelvdev)
• Online support groups (illness and social media) – Henry Potts, CHIME, Chris Barker, Psych
• Science and Technology Studies Dept: how do technologies fit in societies generally?
• Myportfolio.ucl.ac.uk
• UCL Mental health sciences staff have expertise in picking up on risky communication i.e. suicidal crisis
• Prototype for geographical harvesting of tweets
• A load of computer scientists

Next post: direction for future research at UCL

One of the first questions we are interested in as part of our Grand Challenges Project on social media at UCL is what research is already going on at UCL on social media? At our kick-off Town Meeting, Daniel Miller discussed some of the work going on in the Anthropology Department at the meeting, and project member Claire Warwick also told us of the many different projects and people working on social media in the Centre for Digital Humanities.

We asked participants at the meeting to tell us about other areas of research which uses, or is on social media at UCL.

Below is a wordle which contains all the other areas of research on social media currently going on at UCL. If you notice any that are not listed then add them in the comments section below, preferably with links to the project websites:

Next post: Who is working on social media at UCL?

Welcome to the UCL Social Media Project blog! #UCLSMP

The project is funded by a UCL Grand Challenges small grant and aims to foster greater networking between academics working on social media (as an object of study and as a tool for research) at UCL and also instigate new interdisciplinary research projects.

We’ll use this blog to keep everyone up-to-date with the project activities and also to provide a space for further engagement and discussion.

The project steering group is comprised of:

Dr Simon Jay Lock, Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL

Professor Claire Warwick, UCL Centre of Digital Humanities

Dr Karen Bultitude, Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL

Dr Jon Agar, Department of Science and Technology Studies, UCL

Dr Steve Cross. UCL Public Engagement Unit

Dr Anthony Watkinson, Department of Information Studies, UCL