One of the major concerns of social media research relates to ethics. The unprecedented abundance of data available online constitutes an enormous resource for researchers, but equally poses some serious and pressing challenges. A workshop held in Bristol on the 23rd of April, organised by…
The Selfie Citizenship workshop was held at Manchester Metropolitan University on the 16th of April 2015. Organised by Adi Kuntsman, Farida Vis and Simon Faulkner, the event brought together a number of researchers to explore the connection between social media and theories of citizenship. This…
Three members of the Visual Social Media Lab attended the What is an Image? conference in Copenhagen last week. Farida Vis gave an overview of various approaches and concerns relevant to the study of social media photography and Simon Faulkner discussed the development of the…
“1.8 billion photos shared per day”[i] The aim of the ‘Picturing the Social’ project is to look at various forms of image sharing on social media, and as part of this, ‘Imaging Sheffield’ takes a specific look at the sharing practices that involve images of…
In a recent blog post, I discussed the ethical problems faced by researchers who use online data. I argued that the visibility of data was often taken to imply that the material was public and therefore suitable for repurposing and analysis. But this attitude draws…
We conduct research not just to mine data from informants, but to learn about their theoretical and pragmatic insights (Boellstorff et. al, 2012: 16) For me, this line from ‘Ethnography and Virtual Worlds: A Handbook of Methods’ sums up the value of ethnographic research. As…
Never lose touch of the goal of ethnography: to make meaning of culture. Interpretations should be situated and they must be questioned. Ethnographers should always be reflexive about their interpretations, biases, and limitations (boyd, 2009: 30). The interrogation of taken-for-granted meanings has long been the…
I will be participating in an event held by the Association for Research Ethics at the University of Bristol in April, on the topic of ethics in social media research. A link to the programme is available here. As a result, I have begun to…
The ethnography I will be conducting for ‘Picturing the Social’ aims to explore and understand the ways in which people use and experience online photographic sharing. Before I progress any further, I need to ask myself, what is it I want to know? What is…
One of the central principles — and strengths — of ethnographic research relates to the means by which data is collected. Alongside conducting interviews and watching participants’ interactions and practices, the ethnographer also obtains their findings through placing themselves within the same social context. Typically, this would involve joining…
