Congratulations to Yan Chen, whose first PhD paper is published (open access) today in Frontiers in Big Data, titled From theory to practice: Insights and hurdles in collecting social media data for social science research. She started her PhD in 2018, the year of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and this paper is a perspective piece that documents her challenges of data access for her PhD, which took her through eight different options before finding one that worked (enough). This was in stark contrast to Instagram data collection for her Master’s several years before, for which she used the academic tool Netlytic. The closing of APIs starting in 2018 did not make people safer, it just concentrated the data in a smaller set of (commercial) hands. This paper advocates for a stronger role for government and other regulators in ensuring access to social media for public good research.
Tag: Instagram (Page 1 of 2)
Synthesis figure in the new Current Sociology paper showing sample workflows within a range of possibilities.
This week a new open access paper came out in a special issue (monograph) of Current Sociology about Social Impact Assessment. The special issue was led by Guadalupe Ortiz and Antonio Aledo, and their introductory essay is worth a read, as is Frank Vanclay’s epilogue, reflecting on 50 years of SIA and asking “is it still fit for purpose?”. Our offering, Social media and social impact assessment: Evolving methods in a shifting context, reflects on a decade of research using mostly Instagram to understand the social impacts of developments such as hydroelectricity, wind energy and coastal dyke realignment. The above demonstrates the current state of the art in terms of workflows, and shows how several of our studies have navigated those options. The paper also talks about the challenges, practical and ethical, of using social media datasets, and calls for government support in securing ongoing access for the purposes of public good research, a topic also recently argued by Ethan Zuckerman in Prospect Magazine. Most of the work synthesized in this paper has been published elsewhere, except the brilliant work that Mehrnoosh Mohammadi did on developing a collage approach to communicating common features in social media images to protect both copyright and privacy concerns (see below). This is a method we advocated back in 2017 and it is wonderful to see it in action.
A collage by Mehrnoosh Mohammadi of 16 photos captured in NS vineyards and posted on Instagram, showing seasonal change from left to right.
Figure 2 process flowchart of the new Zhao et al. paper in Marine Policy
Another nice lab output this week in Marine Policy led by Qiqi Zhao, a China Scholarship Council visiting PhD student in my lab last year, including a bunch of other lab-affiliated students as co-authors: Modelling cultural ecosystem services in agricultural dykelands and tidal wetlands to inform coastal infrastructure decisions: a social media data approach. It is a bit of a companion piece to the Chen et al (2020) piece in Ocean and Coastal Management, as it uses the same Instagram dataset collected for every dykeland area in Nova Scotia back in 2018, but in a very different way. Chen et al. took a very qualitative ‘small data’ approach to the dataset, analyzing the photographs (and accounts) only of posts that included the words dyke*/dike*/wetland/marsh in the captions. Zhao et al. used a ‘big data’ text mining approach, extracting and associating bi-grams (two-word strings) from geolocated post captions to particular cultural ecosystem services (CES), modelling those CES using SolVES and comparing (as with Chen et al.) dykeland and wetland services. Whereas Chen et al. only found direct mentions of freshwater marshes (specifically Miner’s Marsh), in Zhao et al. we leveraged the coordinates to locate those geolocated to tidal wetland sites. This will help us better understand the tradeoffs associated with climate change-driven adaptations of the dykeland system in the Bay of Fundy, the focus of NSERC ResNet Landscape 1.
Visiting PhD student Qiqi Zhao (second from right), has a project that brings my lab together to collaborate; from left to right, Mehrnoosh Mohammadi, Yan Chen (and Esther) and Emily Wells (not pictured: Keshava Pallavi Gone and Keahna Margeson).
We had a fun (and rare) lab meeting on Tuesday to workshop a collaborative project inspired by the visit of Chinese PhD student Qiqi Zhao. The SolVES methods she has used so far in her research in Nanjing require some adjustment to explore rural Nova Scotia. This project will bring together the expertise of students I am working with around culturomics and social media methods generally (Mehrnoosh, Yan, Keshava, Keahna), including manual and machine learning approaches, and cultural ecosystem services and relational values (Emily, Mehrnoosh, Qiqi, Yan), including quite a few who have already engaged in the Bay of Fundy target system (Emily, Mehrnoosh, Yan). An exciting nexus of skills and interests as we set about establishing a better understanding of those tricky non-material services and values on the multifunctional Bay of Fundy coast.
Mehrnoosh Mohammadi defending her MES thesis on Dec 3, 2021, online.
Proud to see Mehrnoosh Mohammadi ably defend her MES about energy infrastructure in vineyards on Friday, starting with a strong presentation of the mixed methods and findings, followed by questions from her committee and examiner and an in camera deliberation. I’ve never seen so many guests at a defense; Mehrnoosh had many friends and family calling in from near and far to support her, as well as a few students and other scholars. My SRES colleague Dr. Michelle Adams was an excellent examiner, bringing lots of ideas from her work at the interface of sustainability and business, and my former postdoc Dr. H. M. Tuihedur Rahman provided wonderful support as committee member and stats expert. Dr. Heather Cray chaired it in record time. The work was funded by SSHRC, thanks to an IDG led by Dr. Kirby Calvert, a Nova Scotia Graduate Scholarship, and a Parya Scholarship. Thanks to all who helped it happen, and of course congratulations to Mehrnoosh.
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