This document summarizes an ongoing study that is investigating how social media researchers manage and work with social media data. The study uses qualitative interviews with 20 social media researchers so far from a variety of disciplines and countries. The interviews explore the researchers' data collection, management and analysis practices as well as problems they encounter. Preliminary results on selected topics are presented but coding and analysis of the full set of interviews is still ongoing. The goal is to develop theories on how social media research can be improved based on lessons learned from researchers' experiences working with these new types of digital data sources.

1. The Hidden Data of Social Media Research:
Exploring Practices and Problems of Working with
Social Media Data
Katrin Weller & Katharina Kinder-Kurlanda
GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences
Contact: katrin.weller@gesis.org, katharina.kinder-kurlanda@gesis.org
Work in progress
• Investigation of social media
researchers’ data management
methods, practices and
problems
• Exploratory design: qualitative
semi-structured interviews
with social media researchers
• Theory building occurs in pa-
rallel to the experiences in
the ‘field’
• Coding and analysis are still
ongoing – preliminary results
for selected topics are available
Current status Future work
• 20 interviews so far
• Interviewees …
• … mainly from social science/
communication studies
• … from Europe (8), US (7),
Australia (5)
• … PhD students to full
professors
• …withexperiencesinresearch
based on data gathered
from several platforms:
Twitter (13), Facebook (5),
blogs (10), Foursquare,
Tumblr, 4chan, reddit and
more
• Next interviews planned
• Multiple disciplines
• Detailed coding of interviews
• Next topics to be analyzed:
data collection and
processing as well as
epistemology.
“…it is hard to have standards nowadays
because the field develops so fast.”
“Oh my gosh, we have
this amazing data!”
“I always feel it
must be great to be
a hacker!”
“But you can’t make your data available for others to
look at, which means both your study can’t really be
replicated and it can’t be tested for review.”
“I would like more tools for collecting data.
From services that aren‘t Twitter.”
“It seems very hard, or nearly impossible, to
do this kind of stuff in the future as a single
or individual researcher.”
“My questions are limited to
what I can do. “ “I will not quote tweets”
“I love thinking
about ethics”
Kinder-Kurlanda, K., & Weller, K. (2014). “I always feel it must be great to be a hacker!” The role of interdisciplinary work in social media research.
To appear in Proceedings of the ACM Web Science Conference 2014, Bloomington, IN, USA 2014.
Weller, K., & Kinder-Kurlanda, K. (2014). “I love thinking about ethics!” Perspectives on ethics in social media research.
To appear in Proceedings of Internet Research 15: Boundaries and Intersections, Bangkok, Thailand 2014.
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