PhD student workshop: Collecting and analysing social media data

The ESRC-funded “Social Media – Developing Understanding, Infrastructure & Engagement” (ES/M001628/1) award based at the University of Aberdeen is organising a workshop for PhD student researchers in the social sciences to come together to explore the challenges of collecting and analysing social media data. The workshop will run over two days (June 16-17) and will commence at 11am on day 1, and conclude at 5pm on day 2.

The workshop will cover tools, techniques and methods of social media data analysis equipping participants with a toolkit that will allow them to select, obtain, process, analyse and present a social media data set.

Activities during the workshop will be grounded in case studies, and hands-on sessions will use data sets from recent research at Aberdeen. Topics will include data collection and transformation, ethics, analysis and visualisation. The event is targeted at PhD student researchers in Social Science disciplines (i.e. those whose research would be funded by ESRC). The workshop venue is the MacRobert Building at the University of Aberdeen. Practical sessions will involve participants obtaining data from different social media platforms, a tour of available software tools (including those developed at Aberdeen), and analysis of real datasets. The sessions are designed to be ‘hands on’ and will involve active participation from attendees. We are asking participants to bring a laptop with them, if at all possible. Attending the workshop is free. Funding is available to support travel to Aberdeen, some accommodation costs, all lunches during the event and dinner for all participants on day 1. Due to the source of funding only UK based PhD students are eligible for funding. Applications from non-UK based researchers will be considered if there are places available and they can fund their own travel and subsistence. An application for funding to attend the workshop is part of the online application form. The deadline for applications is 4pm Thursday 26th May.

Link to the application form: http://goo.gl/forms/apKA2yvfcQ Link to the

Link to the webpage about the workshop: http://www.dotrural.ac.uk/social-media-data-training-workshops/ Places are limited, so please apply early.