#Aoir2016 Internet Rules!

This full-day workshop introduces participants to digital methods and their applications in media, cultural and internet studies via a series of short talks and masterclasses. Participants will be supplied ahead of time with learning resources including tutorials, readings and rich media examples. The schedule provides opportunities for discussion and practical experimentation. The workshop is designed for internet researchers at all stages of their careers.

*Short sessions*

_Conceptual Introduction: Situating Digital Methods (Richard Rogers)_

There is currently a debate at hand over aligning political and social research with the digital age, concomitant with the rise of the term Big Data. For some, it has been termed the computational turn, meaning the importation of computer science techniques into social research practices. Another could be the digital turn, where the study of digital culture informs research that makes use of online data, software and visualizations. To make this distinction between the computational and the digital turns is also a means of resisting a monolithic understanding of research in the digital age. Here I briefly situate and discuss a series of digital research practices called cultural analytics, culturomics, webometrics, altmetrics and digital methods, providing short examples of what they could offer in terms of research.

_Twitter studies with DMI-TCAT (Erik Borra)_

The workshop provides an introduction to the open source Twitter Capture and Analysis Tool (TCAT). The tool, which can be downloaded and installed on a server, allows for a battery of analyses of a tweet collection (also made via the Twitter APIs sourced by TCAT), from simple and experimental activity measures to those concerning mention, reply, hashtag, URL reference, retweet and other analytical opportunities. TCAT has been designed for data collection and analytical prep and may be used in conjunction with other network analysis tools as Gephi, which is also introduced in this workshop.

_Analysing Social Media Data with TCAT and Tableau (Axel Bruns)_

Especially when working with large social media datasets, visual data analysis is now an indispensable part of the scholarly research and publication process. Data visualisation is able to provide a rapid overview of patterns in the dataset, and to pinpoint specific events and areas that should be selected for further in-depth analysis. The social media data analytics workshop will focus on a key emerging tool for large-scale analysis, Tableau, for processing and visualising large datasets.

_Analysing Network Dynamics with Agent Based Models (Patrik Wikström)_

Information diffusion and other time-based processes in social media networks are examples of inherently complex phenomena characterized by nonlinear properties such as “tipping points” or “virtuous” (or “vicious”) circles. These properties make them very difficult to capture with our traditional approaches for theory development and we often run the risk of making superficial analyses that are able to explain the observed patterns. This workshop showcases Agent Based Modelling, which is an approach that has proven to be a useful alternative for unpacking complex and dynamic phenomena.

_Tracking the Trackers (Anne Helmond, Carolin Gerlitz, Esther Weltevrede and Fernando van der Vlist)_

Social media plugins, including social buttons, enable users to engage with platform actions such as liking, sharing or tweeting across the web, but at the same time function as third-party objects tracking users across external websites and apps and feeding data back to the associated platforms. In this workshop we will explore how to detect, map and analyze such tracker networks. We will demonstrate the Tracker Tracker tool, developed at the University of Amsterdam, which is able to scan sets of websites for trackers and output the results in a graph file that can subsequently be used in the free network visualisation software application Gephi.

_Multiplatform Issue Mapping (Jean Burgess & Ariadna Matamoros Fernandez)_

Issue Mapping is an advanced method for making sense of the public engagement around topics where there is a lot of uncertainty or disagreement. This workshop introduces the University of Amsterdam’s DMI Tumblr and YouTube tools, and the free network visualisation software application Gephi. We demonstrate how to use these tools in combination to build an inventory of key media objects (including hashtags, URLs and audiovisual texts) and to map the issue networks associated with digital media controversies.

_Analysing and visualising geospatial data (Peta Mitchell)_

Spatial information, or geodata, is a rapidly growing subset of big data. Social media platforms that rely on location-based services, as many do, are increasingly geosocial, generating large, real-time geodata sets. This workshop will focus on the particular challenges facing socio-cultural researchers in relation to accessing, analysing, and visualising spatial information, particularly in regard to geosocial media data. The workshop will provide a practical introduction to using the web-based mapping platform CartoDB to visualise and spatially analyse geodata. The ethics and limitations of dealing with geosocial data will also be explored.