The World Wide Web is only around 20 years old, but it has become central to our economic, political and social lives. This course will provide students with thorough training in online research methods for social science Internet research. While "obtrusive" social research methods (e.g. online surveys and focus groups) will be covered, there is greater emphasis on unobstrusive research methods, e.g. quantitative analysis of Internet trace data from websites, blogsites, microblogs (Twitter) and social networking sites such as Facebook.
The course has a mixture of lectures and practical sessions. Practical sessions will be focused on unobtrusive online research and will involve the use of the VOSON System (collection/analysis of hyperlink networks), VOSON-sns (collection/analysis of social network service data) and NodeXL (Microsoft Excel 2007 template for social network analysis).
By taking this course, students will acquire important skills necessary for conducting empirical social science Internet research both in academic and industry settings. Students will learn:
· What online research methods are best suited for researching various economic, political and social phenomena on the Internet, and how do these differ from methods traditionally used by social scientists?
· What are the available tools and data for online research?
· How to collect and analyse data from the Internet?
· How to design and implement a research project that uses online research methods?
· What are the ethical implications of the various online research methods?
Prof. Robert Ackland is based in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU). He was awarded his PhD in economics from the ANU in 2001, and he has been researching online social and organisational networks since 2002. He leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks Lab (http://vosonlab.net) which was established in 2005 and is advancing the social science of the Internet by conducting research, developing research tools, and providing research training. Robert has been teaching masters courses in online research methods and the social science of the internet since 2008 (undergraduate versions of the courses started in 2017) and in 2019 he began teaching a course on economic analysis of the digital economy. His book Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age (SAGE) was published in July 2013. He created the VOSON software for hyperlink network construction and analysis, which has been publicly available since 2006 and has been used by around 3000 researchers worldwide, and he is a co-creator of the vosonSML and VOSONDash R packages for collecting and analysing social media network and text data.
Participants are strongly advised to have taken the ACSPRI course Introduction to Social Network Research and Network Analysis.
The course assumes participants have good familiarity with using computers, in particular web applications. This course is aimed at two types of participants:
l Those who are familiar with social science statistics (e.g. cross tabulations, descriptive statistics), have some experience with software such as SPSS/Stata/SAS, and some exposure to social network analysis (SNA), but who have never studied the web or used online research methods.
l Those who do not necessarily have a background in empirical social science, but are technically oriented, with good computer skills and an existing interest/experience in the web as an object of/medium for empirical research.
The course assumes participants have good familiarity with using computers, in particular web applications. This course is aimed at two types of participants:
1. Those who are familiar with social science statistics (e.g. cross tabulations, descriptive statistics), have some experience with software such as SPSS/Stata/SAS, and (possibly) some exposure to social network analysis (SNA), but who have never studied the web or used online research methods.
2. Those who do not necessarily have a background in empirical social science, but are technically oriented, with good computer skills and an existing interest/experience in the web as an object of/medium for empirical research.
Detailed course notes will be provided, including selected chapters from D. Hansen, B. Shneiderman and M. Smith (eds), Analyzing Social Media Networks with NodeXL: Insights from a connected world. Morgan-Kaufmann (forthcoming).
See http://vosonlab.net/ for information on the VOSON System and VOSON-sns and http://nodexl.codeplex.com for information on NodeXL.
A detailed online user guide will be provided.