| Schedule and Program | ||
|---|---|---|
| Time | Topic | Speakers |
08:30 - 09:00 |
Arrival and coffee |
|
09:00 - 09:20 |
Welcome and introduction |
All participants |
09:20 - 10:10 |
User-centered data collections for research on digital democracy |
Sebastian Stier, Philipp Lorenz-Spreen, Lisa Oswald |
10:10 - 10:40 |
Coffee break |
|
10:40 - 11:00 |
Collective field experiments on Reddit |
Lisa Oswald |
11:00 - 11:20 |
Ecologically momentary assessments via the Twitter API |
Philipp Lorenz-Spreen |
11:20 - 11:50 |
CSS Infrastructures: National Internet Observatory and GESIS |
Pranav Goel, Sebastian Stier |
11:50 - 12:30 |
Interactive session: what data do you need for your research? |
All participants |
Logistics
The tutorial will take place on Wednesday, July 17, 2024 from 9:00 AM to 12:30 PM in Room Houston: Bodek Lounge.
Motivation
In the middle of a crucial election year in the U.S. and Europe, political forces like populist parties or authoritarian governments abroad and societal processes such as polarization or declining trust in parliaments pose threats to the legitimacy of democratic institutions. Academic research on the role of digital media in shaping these processes and democracy at-large is striving. Nonetheless, our research areas and analysis potential are oftentimes restricted to the data provided by large online platforms. While getting individual-level data has been an important issue ever since, platforms have restricted data access further. Therefore, researchers have started to devise their own solutions for collecting relevant digital behavioral data in the “Post-API Age”. For democracy research in particular, it is important to link digital behavioral data with individual-level information on demographics and variables like party identification, political trust or evaluations of other societal groups. To conduct user-centered data collections, research software like web tracking browser plugins, mobile apps or data donations are being developed at various academic institutions. The workshop will bring together research groups working on new technical solutions and innovative approaches for studying digital democracy.
Rationale of the tutorial
This workshop will help build a community of leading research teams and researchers at different career levels. The workshop is situated at the intersection of democracy research, software development and computational social science, contributing to a joint understanding of the research needs, data gaps and identification of synergies. To create valuable research data and increase independence from platforms, the academic community needs to build sustainable research infrastructures and ultimately develop joint conceptual and measurement standards. We welcome participants with diverse disciplinary backgrounds, with interest in substantive research questions, software engineering, open-source development and open science practices, many of whom share a research interest in digital media and democracy, broadly conceived. Participants will learn about innovative approaches in collecting and analyzing digital behavioral data, the most pressing themes in research on (digital) democracy and will be able to articulate and identify joint infrastructure demands. The teams working on new methodological approaches can gather valuable feedback at the workshop, learn more about and create synergies with the work of other teams.
Program
Our goal is to provide a venue in which participants will engage with the topic through various formats: presentations of experts on the field, collaborative breakouts, and plenary discussion.
We will have at brief input presentations followed by respective Q&A sessions where recent innovative approaches for user-centered data collections will be presented and discussed. Based on the research interests of participants, we will critically discuss the applicability of different approaches for specific research questions, the remaining blind spots of the proposed data collection approaches and how these could complement each other.
The tentative schedule can be found below (all times are Philadelphia local time, EDT/GMT-4).
Organizers and speakers
Sebastian Stier is a Scientific Director of the department Computational Social Science at GESIS – Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and Professor of Computational Social Science at the University of Mannheim. His substantive research focuses on the impact of digital media on societies and democratic processes. In his methodological work, Sebastian Stier investigates the quality and scientific value of digital behavioral data for social science research.
GESIS is building infrastructures for collecting, pre-processing, analyzing and providing digital behavioral data to facilitate the application of computational social science approaches in different social science fields. The infrastructure comprises research software like a web tracking tool, an app for mobile experience sampling and the new GESIS Panel.dbd with more than 5,000 participants for the collection of linked surveys and digital behavioral data.
Philipp Lorenz-Spreen is a research scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, where his research focuses on the complexity of self-organized online discourse and its impact on democracies worldwide. Recently, he has become interested in how the research community can foster the paradigm shift in data access for research through the DSA. He received his PhD from the TU Berlin on empirical methods and theoretical models to describe the dynamics of collective attention.
Philipp will discuss a study design that links individual behavior on social media with specific survey responses in real time. We use this setup to address the question: What motivates people to share and create content online? Via the Twitter API and direct messages, individual posts are linked with self-reported motives from a sample of US Twitter users. Our results reveal that when our participants were motivated by the goals of informing and persuading others, they used negative language and expressed outrage. In contrast, entertaining content and positive language was used for socializing and attention. Finally, we will discuss the current limitations of the API and how the EU’s Digital Services Act (DSA) might help to run such studies in the future.
Lisa Oswald is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. After receiving her PhD in political science from the Hertie School for which she worked with web browsing histories and social media data to study public discourse in online environments, she now focuses on online field experiments and interventions. She is interested in new methods of participant recruitment and ways to examine causal mechanisms of digital media effects on political cognition and behavior.
Lisa’s talk demonstrates the design and implementation of a Reddit-based interactional field experiment. We discuss how to recruit participants on the platform via Reddit Ads and manage participants using moderator functions and the Reddit API. We show opportunities for the granular observation of political discussions under experimentally controlled conditions using the current status of Reddit’s API. Finally, we demonstrate examples of experimental interventions that can be randomly assigned using our procedure as well as the use of repeated surveys to measure changes in attitudes and behaviors.
David Lazer is University Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, and an elected fellow to the National Academy of Public Administration. His research focuses on computational social science, social networks, democratic deliberation, algorithm auditing and collective intelligence.
David is one of the PIs of the National Internet Observatory (NIO). NIO is funded by a generous grant from the National Science Foundation and aims to help researchers understand how people behave online and how online platforms structure what people see. NIO has created a large panel of individuals whose behaviors and interactions with platforms via desktop browsers and smartphones are recorded.
Pranav Goel is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the Lazer Lab at Northeastern University’s Network Science Institute. His research interests broadly span computational social science and natural language processing, viewing language as a social phenomenon and text data as a potent digital trace of societal dynamics. He is particularly interested in the sociopolitical phenomenon of framing (including agenda-setting) in news and social media.
Pranav will present the National Internet Observatory (NIO). The National Internet Observatory (NIO) is an NSF-funded project aimed to help researchers study online behavior via desktop and/or mobile acitvity data donated by users who also provide comprehensive survey responses. The infrastructure will offer approved researchers access to a suite of structured, parsed content data for selected domains to enable analyses of Internet use in the US. Pranav’s talk will provide a brief overview of the NIO infrastructure, the data collected, the participants, and the researcher intake process.
Zoltán Kmetty is an Associate Professor in the Sociology department at the Eötvös Loránd University Faculty of Social Sciences in Budapest, Hungary. He has diverse research interests, including political sociology, network studies, and suicide research. He is an expert in methodology, survey design, and quantitative analysis. In several projects, Zoltán has collected various types of digital behavioral data via data donation approaches.
Several big data donation projects have been started in recent years, so we know more and more about how to conduct such research, what data is available, and who participates in donation research. In his presentation, Zoltán will show what to look for when designing data donation research, what platforms are available, and how donation data can be linked to other data sources (e.g., APIs).