About this Workshop 

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Across the social sciences, scholars and practitioners are constantly adapting their approaches to deal with the open, dynamic and highly complex nature of our increasingly globalized world and its incessant transformations across time, space and place. As myriads of interdependent, contextualized communities evolve in a scenario of constant connectivity, corpora of data for social science research have become significantly larger and more diverse in nature, challenging the existing theories, methods and techniques available for its investigation.

This workshop explores relevant approaches for the systematic exploration, collection and analysis of digital multimodal datasets, with the aim of offering appropriate new tools to researchers. In particular, it will offer an introduction to an emerging critical paradigm for the investigation of Social Media data, namely the Social Media Critical Discourse Studies (SM – CDS) approach.

To start, the workshop will focus on the theoretical implications of a critical, multimodal and context-dependent approach to Social Media, introducing the participants to key readings and authors in the area as well as paying particular attention to gaps in the existing literature.

Secondly, it will highlight the main methodological challenges posed by Social Media platforms as sources of data, such as: selecting and collecting representative data from the cybersphere; performing systematic observations to account for media and genre-specific contexts of communication; and dealing with the fleeting nature of both data and platforms and with the inherent non‐linearity of the participatory web.

Lastly, the workshop will provide an overview of free-to-use and commercial tools and software for the analysis of Social Media data, providing examples of their application in previous research.

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Language: English

Certificate: Yes

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