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A humanistic approach to the study of social media: combining social network analysis & case study research

Published: 03 October 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Humanistic research into social media is presently diverse in approach, but rich in theoretical underpinnings. It is unsurprising that there is some difficulty in translating often text-based approaches to multi-media rich, rapidly-evolving social networking environments. We explore theoretical issues for studying social media with respect to one popular research methodology: case study research (CSR). Here we examine the challenges that social media pose to CSR in the humanities and then advance an approach using social network analysis (SNA) to assist in selecting case studies. This approach, we argue, improves selection of case studies by considering the network structures of social media.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGDOC '11: Proceedings of the 29th ACM international conference on Design of communication
    October 2011
    308 pages
    ISBN:9781450309363
    DOI:10.1145/2038476
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 03 October 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. case study research
    2. humanities
    3. social media
    4. social network analysis

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    SIGDOC '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 36 of 75 submissions, 48%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 355 of 582 submissions, 61%

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    Cited By

    View all
    • (2019)Design tensionsProceedings of the 37th ACM International Conference on the Design of Communication10.1145/3328020.3353944(1-10)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2019
    • (2012)Developing human-centered design approachesProceedings of the 30th ACM international conference on Design of communication10.1145/2379057.2379128(363-364)Online publication date: 3-Oct-2012
    • (2012)Merging Duke Energy and Progress Energy: Online Public Discourse, Post-Fukushima Reactions, and the Absence of Environmental CommunicationEnvironmental Communication10.1080/17524032.2012.6724446:2(278-284)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2012
    • (2012)Figuring Out #Fukushima: An Initial Look at Functions and Content of US Twitter Commentary About Nuclear RiskEnvironmental Communication10.1080/17524032.2012.6724426:2(268-277)Online publication date: 2-May-2012

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