SpringerLink
Log in

Big Data Approaches to the Study of Digital Media

  • Living reference work entry
  • First Online:
Second International Handbook of Internet Research

Abstract

Recently there has been much excitement about using big data in social research, especially data derived from digital media. This chapter examines leading examples of this type of research from three platforms: Facebook, Twitter, and Wikipedia. It discusses their findings, data sources, and claims to validity. The aim is to assess how a number of landmark studies advance on existing social science research, pushing it in the direction of a more quantitative and more scientific mode of research. The chapter argues that this more scientific approach has advantages and drawbacks: on the positive side, for example, it often makes for rapid cumulative advances in knowledge. On the negative side, several of these studies are poorly theorized in terms of how these platforms fit into existing theories and research about the uses of information and communication technologies. The chapter goes on to examine how big data fits into the advance of social science, arguing that research technologies, quantification, and new sources of data are key drivers of research fronts. The chapter concludes with reflections about how these advantages and limitations shape how these studies are used and how they will (or will not) fit into the disciplinary landscape of the social sciences, and the study of media and communications in particular.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Asur S, Huberman B (2010) Predicting the future with social media. ar**v:1003.5699; Retrieved from http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.5699

  • Backstrom L, Boldi P, Rosa M, Ugander J, Vigna S (2012) Four degrees of separation. In: Proceedings of the 3rd annual ACM web science conference (WebSci’12). ACM, New York, pp 33–42

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Barberá P (2015) Birds of the same feather flock together. Bayesian point estimation using Twitter data. Polit Anal 23(1):76–91

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Benkler Y, Faris R, Roberts H, Zuckerman E (2017) Study: Breitbart-led right-wing media ecosystem altered broader media agenda. Columbia Journalism Rev 1(4.1):7

    Google Scholar 

  • Bimber B (2003) Information and American democracy: technology in the evolution of political power. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Bond R, Farris C, Jones J, Kramer A, Marlow C, Settle J, Fowler J (2012) A 61-million-person experiment in social influence and political mobilization. Nature 489:295–298

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • boyd D, Crawford K (2012) Critical questions for big data: provocations for a cultural, technological and scholarly phenomenon. Inf Commun Soc 15(5):662–679

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bruns A, Liang YE (2012) Tools and methods for capturing Twitter data during natural disasters. First Monday 17(4). http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/3937/3193

  • Cha M, Haddadi H, Benevenuto F, Gummadi K (2010) Measuring user influence in Twitter: the million follower Fallacy. In: Proceedings of the international AAAI conference on weblogs and social media (ICWSM), May. Available at http://twitter.mpi-sws.org/. Last accessed 4 Dec 2012

  • Collins R (1994) Why the social sciences won’t become high-consensus, rapid-discovery science. Sociol Forum 9(2):155–177

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Collins R (1998) The sociology of philosophies: a global theory of intellectual change. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Eagle N, Greene K (2014) Reality mining: using big data to engineer a better world. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Ekbia H et al (2015) Big data, bigger dilemmas: a critical review. J Assoc Inf Sci Technol 66(8):1523–1545

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ford H, Wajcman J (2017) ‘Anyone can edit’, not everyone does: Wikipedia’s infrastructure and the gender gap. Soc Stud Sci 47(4):511–527

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Freeman L (2004) The development of social network analysis: a study in the sociology of science. Empirical Press, Vancouver

    Google Scholar 

  • Generous N, Fairchild G, Deshpande A, Del Valle SY, Priedhorsky R (2014) Global disease monitoring and forecasting with Wikipedia. PLoS Comput Biol 10(11):e1003892

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Giles J (2012) Making the links: from E-mails to social networks, the digital traces left life in the modern world are transforming social science. Nature 488:448–450

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Golder S, Macy M (2014) Digital footprints: opportunities and challenges for online social research. Annu Rev Sociol 40:6.1–6.24

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • González-Bailón S, Wang N, Rivero A, Borge-Holthoefer J, Moreno Y (2014) Assessing the bias in samples of large online networks social networks. Soc Networks 38:16–27

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hacking I (1983) Representing and intervening. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hacking I (1992) The self-vindication of the laboratory sciences. In: Pickering A (ed) Science as practice and culture. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, pp 29–64

    Google Scholar 

  • Hamby P (2013) Did Twitter kill the boys on the bus? Searching for a better way to cover a campaign. Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy

    Google Scholar 

  • Hermida A (2013) Twitter as an ambient news network. In: Weller K, Bruns A, Burgess J, Mahrt M, Puschmann C (eds) Twitter and society. Peter Lang, Oxford, pp 359–372

    Google Scholar 

  • Hill BM, Shaw A (2013) The Wikipedia gender gap revisited: characterizing survey response bias with propensity score estimation. PLoS One 8(6):e65782

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hindman M (2010) The myth of digital democracy. Princeton University Press, Princeton

    Google Scholar 

  • Kramer AD, Guillory JE, Hancock JT (2014) Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 201320040

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kwak H, Lee C, Park H, Moon S (2010) What is Twitter, a social network or a news media? In: Proceedings of the 19th international World Wide Web (WWW) conference, 26–30 Apr 2010, Raleigh

    Google Scholar 

  • Lazer D, Kennedy R, King G, Vespignani A (2014) The parable of Google flu: traps in big data analysis. Science 343(6176):1203–1205

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Leskovec J, Horvitz E (2008) Planetary-scale views on a large instant-messaging network. International World Wide Web conference (WWW), Bei**g

    Google Scholar 

  • Lewis K, Kaufman J, Gonzalez M, Wimmer A, Christakis N (2008) Tastes, ties, and time: a new social network dataset using Facebook.com. Soc Networks 30(4):330–342

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Liao H-T (2009) Conflict and consensus in the Chinese version of Wikipedia. IEEE Technol Soc Mag 28(2):49–56

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Manyika J, Chui M, Brown B, Bughin J, Dobbs R, Roxburgh C, Byers C (2011) Big data: the next frontier for innovation, competition and productivity. McKinsey Global Institute. Available at: http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/mgi/research/technology_and_innovation/big_data_the_next_frontier_for_innovation. Last accessed 29 Aug 2012

  • Mayer-Schoenberger V, Cukier K (2013) Big data: a revolution that will transform how we live, work and think. John Murray, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Mestyán M, Yasseri T, Kertész J (2012) Early prediction of movie box office success based on Wikipedia activity big data. http://arxiv.org/abs/1211.0970. Last accessed 4 Dec 2012

  • Meyer ET, Schroeder R (2015) Knowledge machines digital transformations of the sciences and humanities. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Meyer ET, Schroeder R, Cowls J (2016) The net as a knowledge machine: how the Internet became embedded in research. New Media Soc 18(7):1159–1189

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • O’Neil C (2016) Weapons of math destruction: how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy. Allen Lane, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Okoli C, Mehdi M, Mesgari M, Nielsen F, Lanamäki A (2012) The people’s encyclopedia under the gaze of the sages: a systematic review of scholarly research on Wikipedia (available at SSRN)

    Google Scholar 

  • Pasquale F (2015) The black box society: the secret algorithms that control money and information. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Porter T (2008) Statistics and statistical methods. In: Porter T, Ross D (eds) The modern social sciences. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 238–250

    Google Scholar 

  • Prior M (2007) Post-broadcast democracy: how media choice increases inequality in political involvement and polarizes elections. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Rainie L, Wellman B (2012) Networked: the new social operating system. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Reagle JM (2010) Good faith collaboration: the culture of Wikipedia. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Rule J (2007) Privacy in peril: how we are sacrificing a fundamental right in exchange for security and convenience. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Savage M, Burrows R (2007) The coming crisis of empirical sociology. Sociology 41(5):885–899

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Savage M, Burrows R (2009) Some further reflections on the coming crisis of empirical sociology. Sociology 43(4):762–772

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder R (2007) Rethinking science, technology and social change. Stanford University Press, Stanford

    Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder R (2014a) Big data: towards a more scientific social science and humanities? In: Graham M, Dutton WH (eds) Society and the Internet. Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp 164–176

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder R (2014b) Big data and the brave new world of social media research. Big Data Soc 1(2):1–11

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder R (2016) Big data and communication research. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication, http://communication.oxfordre.com/

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder R (2018) Social theory after the Internet: media, technology and globalization. UCL Press, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Schroeder R, Taylor L (2015) Big data and Wikipedia research: social science knowledge across disciplinary divides. Inf Commun Soc 18(9):1039–1056

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Segev E, Ahituv N (2010) Popular searches in Google and Yahoo!: a “digital divide” in information uses? Inf Soc 26(1):17–37

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Silver N (2012) The signal and the noise: the art and science of prediction. Allen Lane, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Tancer B (2009) Click: what millions of people are doing online and why it matters. Harper Collins, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Tatum C, LaFrance M (2009) Wikipedia as a distributed knowledge laboratory: the case of neoliberalism. In: Jankowski N (ed) e-Research: transformation in scholarly practice. Routledge, Abingdon, pp 310–327

    Google Scholar 

  • van Dijck J (2013) The culture of connectivity: a critical history of social media. Oxford University Press, Oxford

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Waller V (2011) Not just information: who searches for what on the search engine Google? J Am Soc Inf Sci Technol 62(4):761–775

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Waterman D (2005) Hollywood’s road to riches. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Weller K, Bruns A, Burgess J, Mahrt M, Puschmann C (eds) (2013) Twitter and society. Peter Lang, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • West R, Weber I, Castillo C (2012) Drawing a data-driven portrait of Wikipedia editors. In: Proceedings of the 8th international symposium on Wikis and open collaboration (WikiSym’12), Linz, 2012. Available at http://www.wikisym.org/ws2012/bin/view/Main/Program. Last accessed 4 Dec 2012

  • Wilson R, Gosling S, Graham L (2012) A review of Facebook research in the social sciences. Perspect Psychol Sci 7(3):203–220

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Yasseri T, Sumi R, Rung A, Kornai A, Kertész J (2012) Dynamics of conflicts in Wikipedia. PLoS One 7(6):e38869

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zhang X, Zhu F (2011) Group size and incentives to contribute: a natural experiment at Chinese Wikipedia. Am Econ Rev 101:1601–1615

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zimmer M (2010) “But the data is already public”: on the ethics of research in Facebook. Ethics Inf Technol 12(4):313–325

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Ralph Schroeder

  2. The Alan Turing Institute, London, UK

    Josh Cowls

Authors
  1. Ralph Schroeder
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Josh Cowls
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Ralph Schroeder or Josh Cowls .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    Jeremy Hunsinger

  2. IT University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Lisbeth Klastrup

  3. Bldg. 209, 3rd Floor, Curtin University, Bentley, Western Autralia, Australia

    Matthew M. Allen

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 Springer Science+Business Media B.V., part of Springer Nature

About this entry

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this entry

Schroeder, R., Cowls, J. (2018). Big Data Approaches to the Study of Digital Media. In: Hunsinger, J., Klastrup, L., Allen, M. (eds) Second International Handbook of Internet Research. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1202-4_13-1

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1202-4_13-1

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht

  • Print ISBN: 978-94-024-1202-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-94-024-1202-4

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Biomedicine and Life SciencesReference Module Biomedical and Life Sciences

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation