In this session, we provide an overview of methods and research used to study online networks of political discussion on social media (Twitter, Hyperlinks, Reddit), using data collected with the VOSON Lab suite of open-source R tools: vosonSML, VOSON Dashboard and voson.tcn.
We will also present a live demo of VOSONDash, an interactive R Shiny web application for the collection (via vosonSML), visualisation and analysis of social media network data.
About
The Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks VOSON Lab is located in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. We are advancing the Social Science of the Internet through an innovative programme of research, research tool development, and teaching and training. The VOSON tools have been publicly available since 2006. The current R tools are available on CRAN and GitHub, with over 61K downloads to date, and are downloaded over 1K times per month.
Speakers
Prof Robert Ackland : VOSON Lab School of Sociology and ANU Centre for Social Research and Methods @Australian National University
Robert works at the intersection of empirical social science and computer science, developing new approaches (involving information retrieval, data visualisation and social network analysis) for studying networks on the World Wide Web.
Francisca Borquez: Research Assistant @VOSON Lab
As part of the VOSON Lab, she has assisted in diverse research projects and has collaborated with open-source software developed at the lab. Her research interests are online social and organisational networks, online behaviour, computational methods and experimental social research.
Bryan Gertzel: Research Programmer @VOSON Lab
Bryan is the main developer and maintainer of the VOSON Lab suite of tools. He has collaborated in large-scale data collection projects and is involved in the research project Unbiased Bots That Build Bridges (U3B): Technical Systems that Support Deliberation and Diversity as a Chance for Political Discourse, led by the University of Bielefeld, Germany.
See http://vosonlab.net/ for more information.