Digital Methods 2013

The final speakers in this Digital Methods plenary are Axel Maireder and Katrin Jungnickel, whose interest is in the uncertainties of the Facebook timeline. Facebook has continued to tinker with how the timeline is selected and presented for several years now, and this affects the flow of communication on the platform; what, then, are the factors which determine that flow?

This study combined content analysis and user surveys, but both these approaches have their drawbacks - it is impossible from the outside to track the content of users' timelines, for example, but surveys of users also suffer from self-reporting biases …

The next plenary speaker at Digital Methods is Martin Emmer, whose focus is on sampling methods in digital contexts. Online media are now important public fora, and conventional media are increasingly using digital channels to transmit their content as well; this also leads to a shift in media usage, of course, and some of that shift is also driven by generational change.

If we need to examine the digital space to understand current debates in the public sphere, then, how do we generate representative samples of online content and activities? With traditional mass media, it was possible to draw on …

The next session at Digital Methods is a plenary panel which begins with Christina Schumann, whose focus is on Google and other search engines as technological actors on the Internet. Search engines are especially important as they now serve as a kind of gatekeeper on the Net - but the criteria they use for ranking and structuring information are often far from transparent.

The basic approach of search engines is to crawl or otherwise gather Internet data which are then indexed and processed into a database; this database is queried as a search query is entered into the search engine …

At the end of an extended trip to a range of conferences and symposia I've made my way to Vienna, where I'm attending the DGPuK Digital Methods conference at the University of Vienna. The conference is in German, but I'll try to blog the presentations in English nonetheless - wish me luck... We begin with keynote by Jürgen Pfeffer, addressing - not surprisingly - the question of 'big data' in communications research.

Jürgen begins by asking what's different about 'big data' research. In our field, we're using 'big data' on communication and interaction to work towards a real-time analysis of …