The Challenges of Preserving and Sharing Social Media Research Data

Social Media Data are currently being used as research data across disciplines and help researchers to gain insights into communication patterns and human behavior. However, much of the content in social media is ephemeral and may change or even disappear over time. Solutions for preserving social media data both for today’s research and future uses are needed – but are difficult to obtain. This talk will give an overview on the current approaches for archiving social media data and will explain some of the most urgent challenges including platform lockdowns and data accessibility and discussions about (research) ethics.

This talk will give an overview on the current approaches for archiving social media data and will explain some of the most urgent challenges including platform lock-downs and data accessibility and discussions about (research) ethics.

Presenters

Dr Katrin Weller is an information scientist working at GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences in Köln (Cologne), Department Computational Social Science. At GESIS, she is head of the team “Social Analytics and Services” and interested in new approaches to using social media in social science research, including documenting and archiving social media data. She is studying social media and online communities, for example in the context of scholarly communication and altmetrics.