New article: "New methodologies for the digital age? How methods (re-)organize research using social media data"
DISTRACT researchers Sune Lehmann, Anders Blok, and postdoc at Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society Yangliu Fan (PhD from SODAS) published in December 2023 the paper "New methodologies for the digital age? How methods (re-)organize research using social media data" in Quantitative Science Studies. Drawing on an original data set of 12,732 research articles, they map the use of methods when exploring social media data. They find that research in the social media domain is largely organized by methods and observe that computational methods have penetrated many research areas but not the research space surrounding ethnography. Additionally they identify two core axes of variation—social sciences vs. computer science and methodological individualism vs. relationalism—that organize the domain as a whole, suggesting new methodological divisions and debates.