Researching Social Media After the API: A One-Day Workshop

Date: 19.06.2024
Workshop / training
Format: hybrid
Location: Liverpool, United Kingdom
Event Fee: Free

Organizer(s):
University of Liverpool

In the recent past, social media platforms became more open about working alongside academic researchers and crucially, enabling academic access to their data in order to facilitate political communication research (and many other forms of research besides). However, this has been dramatically reversed in recent years in what Axel Bruns (2019) has referred to as the “APIcalyspe”. Both Meta and X (formerly Twitter) have withdrawn or sought to restrict access to their platforms for academic research by making it prohibitively expensive. The discipline now stands at a crossroads (Bruns, 2019). Either accept and adapt to the new access arrangements, most likely to the detriment of the scope, volume, and overall quality of the research, or consider methodological innovations and workarounds to examine these platforms central to our everyday existence. To this end, we would like to invite contributions to a one-day workshop to be held in hybrid format (online and in person, at the University of Liverpool), to discuss how we might continue to research social media platforms under these difficult conditions. Potential topics could include (but are not restricted to): - researching the ‘black box’ (documenting and analysing communication on closed platforms such as WhatsApp/Discord/ etc. - The significance of small-N case studies - Researching dead or declining platforms - The ethics of collaborating with technology companies - Researching content moderation practices - Practical reflections on specific methods - Qualitative approaches

https://t.co/FuIgwfWMJt

Post created by: Lymor Wolf Goldstein