Nordmedia pre-conference workshop: Digital methods
In the context of the Nordmedia conference, which will be hosted by the University of Copenhagen in August 2015, The Center for Communication and Computing (ccc.ku.dk) invites interested scholars to this open workshop on digital methods.
The workshop takes its point of departure in a number different digital tools for data collection and analysis. The form is methodological presentations, hands on tests and discussion.
The workshop aims to bring together scholars interested in data harvesting and analysis with digital tools for an informal discussion of the potentials and pitfalls of different digital tools and methods. The workshop is organized by Anders Olof Larsson from the department of Media and Communication at the University of Oslo and Stine Lomborg from the CCC at the University of Copenhagen.
The workshop will be held on the 12. August (the day before the conference), from 10.00-17.00 at the University of Copenhagen, southern campus.
The maximum number of participants is 25. Sign-up by emailing Stine Lomborg (slomborg@hum.ku.dk), providing your professional affiliation and contact details and a few lines on your broader research interest, as well as your interest in and experience with digital methods.
Registration deadline: 7. June 2015. Notification of acceptance: 1. July.
Draft program:
10.00 Coffee and Welcome
10.30-12.30: Twitter hashtags and Facebook Pages – Methodological opportunities and Ethical difficulties (facilitated by Post.doc Anders Olof Larsson, University of Oslo)
While technical opportunities for social media data collection are promising, they also carry with them a series of challenges that need to be duly addressed. This session will demonstrate two tools that are available freely – yourTwapperKeeper, which facilitates data gathering of Twitter, and Netvizz, which is focused on Facebook Pages. Drawing on examples from previous research project, the session will provide hands-on methodological advice. Participants are recommended to have a computer with a spreadsheet application installed for the session.
12.30-13.15 Lunch (sponsored by the CCC)
13.15 – 15.15: Scraping websites with Import.io: a study of changes in news sites across time (facilitated by PhD Fellows Jacob Ørmen and Casper Petersen from the CCC, University of Copenhagen)
To study how dynamic websites (such as news sites) changes across time it is necessary to set up ‘lobster traps’ (Karpf 2012) that scrape data continuously and in real-time. A case study of the most read stories on news sites will be presented to illustrate how changes can be studied. The specific tool applied in the workshop is Import.io; a freemium product that can scrape and crawl the web. The specific advantages of this tool are: it requires no coding by researchers; data can easily be extracted and exported; and data extraction can be conducted automatically through an in-built API. The session will be a mixture of case presentation and hands-on experience with import.io.
15.15-15.30: Coffee and cake
15.30-16.30: Methodological and ethical challenges of working with digital methods and data (Short input and discussion facilitated by Associate Professor Stine Lomborg from the CCC, University of Copenhagen).
16.30-16.45: Wrap up
Best regards,
Anders Olof Larsson