On December 3rd, the SMO team held a virtual workshop together with partners within the Research Institute Social Cohesion (FGZ) on research with social media data.

For a general exchange of experiences among researchers working with social media data (SMD), we held an FGZ workshop at the end of 2021. Employees from all FGZ sites who already work with SMD or plan to do so in the future were invited. The goal of the workshop was to share experiences from projects already underway in order to identify common problems, possible solutions, and unmet needs in this research area. In addition to the presentations of work statuses of the projects, the discussion of cross-project “lessons learned” was the focus. The contents of the workshop were divided into four sessions to ensure a stringent discussion of individual aspects. After the introduction to the individual projects (1), we concentrated on ethical and legal issues (2), the various ways to collect data (3), and evaluation and archiving (4). We would like to thank the following FGZ sites, whose projects provided exciting contributions to our exchange:

  • FGZ Section Bielefeld (Uni)
    • BIE_F_03: Regionalising German Tweets
    • BIE_F_03: Gender Portrayal on Instagram
  • FGZ Section Hamburg (HBI)
    • HAM_F_04: Social Media Observatory (SMO)
  • FGZ Section Jena (IDZ)
    • JEN_F_01: International Right-Wing Populism in the Context of Global Ecological Crises (IRÖK)
  • FGZ Section Konstanz (Uni)
    • KON_F_03: Dynamics of social closure in social media platforms
    • KON_F_06: Public sphere regulation through non-attention