Analyzing Social Media Data and Web Networks

As governments, citizens and organizations have moved online there is an increasing need for academic enquiry to adapt to this new context for communication and political action. This adaptation is crucially dependent on researchers being equipped with the necessary methodological tools to extract, analyze and visualize patterns of web activity. This volume profiles the latest techniques being employed by social scientists to collect and interpret data from some of the most popular social media applications, the political parties' own online activist spaces, and the wider system of hyperlinks that structure the inter-connections between these sites. Including contributions from a range of academic disciplines including Political Science, Media and Communication Studies, Economics, and Computer Science, this study showcases a new methodological approach that has been expressly designed to capture and analyze web data in the process of investigating substantive questions.

Robert Ackland, Australian National University, Austrailia Nick Anstead, London School of Economics, UK Gema M. García-Albacete, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain Todd Graham, University of Groningen, Netherlands Daniel Hardt, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Abid Hussain, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Zeshan Ali Jaffari, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark Andreas Jungherr, Otto-Friedrich-Universität, Bamberg, Germany Pascal Jürgens, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz, Germany David Karpf, George Washington University, USA Benjamin Lee, University of Leicester, UK Ben O'Loughlin, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK Jamsheed Shorish, Uberlink Corporation and Shorish Research, Belgium Rosalynd Southern, University of Manchester, UK Laura Sudulich, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium Mike Thelwall, University of Wolverhampton, UK Yannis Theocharis, University of Mannheim, Germany Ravi Vatrapu, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark and Norwegian School of Information Technology, Norway Matt Wall, Swansea University, UK Scott Wright, University of Melbourne, Australia