Social Media - From a Research Point of View
The HSE Laboratory for Internet Research and the Laboratory for Sociology of Science and Education held The international summer school “Social Network Analysis: Internet Research” on 15-22nd August this year on campus at HSE St Petersburg.
There were 24 participants from 11 different countries at the school. People came from Russia, Ukraine, Britain, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Poland, Turkey, Egypt, Chile and South Africa. Leading specialists in researching the internet and social media were invited to give classes. Among them were, Anatoly Gruzd, from Dalhousie University (Canada, Halifax), Ilan Talmud, University of Haifa (Israel), Alex Hanna, University of Wisconsin-Madison (US, Wisconsin), and Benjamin Lind, HSE teacher with a PhD from the University of California, Irvine.
Classes took the form of lectures, seminars, computer exercises and presentations of research projects.
The purpose of the school is to help students master ways of studying the internet using network analysis, to learn specific programmes for analysing internet data and to discuss their own research projects.
They discussed many different topics at the summer school, like the interaction between online and offline student networks, the influence of geography on internet communication, the role of Twitter in political elections, the use of new applications, etc.
One of the fun things that happened was the spontaneous decision by some participants to launch a special hashtag (#snaSPb2013), to unite everyone running microblogs into a social group. This idea was a live experiment to study the dynamics and structure of an online Twitter-community.
by Yuri Rykov and Valentina Ivanyushina
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