Social Media Research: Approaches, Early Findings & Continuing Challenges

[b]Abstract[/b] Social media, the set of online platforms that enable the production and sharing of information across digital networks is demonstrating its potential to affect the ways individuals and societies live, work, and interact with each other. The ease with which information can be shared and the availability of data from the platforms via application program interfaces (APIs) have encouraged researchers to study the communication patterns and infer social behavior and social network structures. However, the relative ease and convenience of acquiring social media data, the technical aspects of data collection can mask underlying critical conceptual and ethical challenges of conducting reliable and useable research. This presentation discusses these challenges from the perspective of an ongoing effort spanning almost three years in collecting and analyzing twitter data relating to social movements (e.g., the Occupy movement) and responses to crises and disasters (e.g., the Boston Marathon bombing). The presentation outlines the general challenges, some concrete approaches to resolving these challenges, a few preliminary results and lessons learned, and directions of future research.