‘What are the challenges of doing digital research- gender identity bias experiment on Twitter’
Hello and welcome to my first podcast episode. Today I will be discussing on the use of twitter on digital research especially focused on the gender identity bias.
To start with, everyone might get very familiar with social media and Twitter, in particular, has become a popular social media platform since 2006 after its invention by three programmers in San Francisco (Picard 2011). Twitter also known as 140 social networking because of its limited of 140 characters in length. As we already know that people generally regard the use of Twitter for social networking, online communication and text messaging. For example, people use twitter to ask particular question, supports, suggestions or any interesting ideas to participate in the discussion with others (Grosseck & Holotescu 2008). In order to use this social media platform, people actually have to create an account with their personal information and identity. And this is the beginning of how many researchers started to use Twitter for different purposes especially in social research field. Because of its enormous users and the identity information can somehow be collected and analyzed for a research purpose. The significant finding of using Twitter in education was a success and many of educators have been applying it for a particular study outcome. Similarly, many of the social researchers have been benefit from using it as a data collection method as well. There are questions whether twitter can be really used for social research tool.
This episode will clearly discuss on the topic of gender bias, identity and the challenges of doing twitter experiment. It will later discuss how twitter bot experiment faces in digital research with two special guests from the twitter bot experiment team to talk about their experience and discuss the finding of this research.
To hear the full podcast, please go through the link below
References:
Ahmed, W 2015, ‘Using Twitter as a data source: an overview of current social media research tools’, viewed 25 September 2017, < http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2015/07/10/social-media-research-tools-overview/>.
Dixon et al. 2014, ‘Gendered space: the digital divide between male and female users in internet public access sites’, viewed 25 Septemebr 2017, < http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jcc4.12088/full>.
Grosseck, G, Holotescu, C 2008, ‘Can we use twitter for educational activities?’, The 4th International Scientific Conference, 17–18 April, viewed 22 September 2017, <https://adlunap.ro/eLSE_publications/papers/2008/015.-697.1.Grosseck%20Gabriela-Can%20we%20use.pdf>.
Jeff, F 2017, ‘The bot’s data and follower’s data and R studio software’ , Western Sydney University, in the unit of Social Research in the Digital World 102194, Coordinated by Jenna Cordie.
Picard, A 2011, ‘The history of twitter 140 characters at a time’, viewed 21 September 2017, < http://www.theglobeandmail.com/technology/digital-culture/social-web/the-history-of-twitter-140-characters-at-a- time/article573416/>.
Zimmer, M, Proferes, N. J 2014, ‘A topology if twitter research: disciplines, methods, and ethics’, Aslib Journal of Information Management, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 250–262.
