Analyzing Social Media Data and Web Networks [Paperback]

As governments, citizens and organizations have moved online there is an increasing need for academic enquiry to adapt to this new context for communication and political action. This adaptation is crucially dependent on researchers being equipped with the necessary methodological tools to extract, analyze and visualize patterns of web activity. This volume profiles the latest techniques being employed by social scientists to collect and interpret data from some of the most popular social media applications, the political parties' own online activist spaces, and the wider system of hyperlinks that structure the inter-connections between these sites. Including contributions from a range of academic disciplines including Political Science, Media and Communication Studies, Economics, and Computer Science, this study showcases a new methodological approach that has been expressly designed to capture and analyze web data in the process of investigating substantive questions.Introduction: The Importance of Method in the Study of the Political Internet'; Marta Cantijoch, Rachel Gibson, Laura Sudulich, Matthew Wall and Stephen Ward PART I: STRUCTURE AND INFLUENCE 1. Political Homophily on the Web; Robert Ackland and Jamsheed Shorish 2. Blogosphere Authority Index 2.0: Change and Continuity in the American Political Blogosphere, 2007-2010; Dave Karpf 3. A Tool for Analysing Youtube Audience Reactions and Discussions; Mike Thelwall PART II: CONTENTS AND INTERACTIONS 4. Social Data Analytics Tool: A Demonstrative Case Study of Methodology and Software; Ravi Vatrapu, Abid Hussain, Daniel Hardt, and Zeshan Jaffari 5. Opportunities and Challenges of Analysing Twitter Content. A Comparison of the Occupation Movements in Spain, Greece and the US; Gema Garcia-Albacete and Yannis Theocharis 6. Stuttgart's Black Thursday on Twitter: Mapping Political Protests with Social Media Data; Andreas Jungherr and Pascal Jurgens 7. Analysing 'Super-participation' in Online Third Spaces; Todd Gral"