The term ‘social media’ has become ubiquitous in our daily lives. Social media is now a crucial aspect of how we form and maintain friendship networks, but it is also increasingly central to commercial exchanges (to branding, PR, advertising), and to news production and consumption (by both professional and citizen journalists). In this workshop participants will consider both visual and textual social media data and appropriate research methods. Basic social network analysis will be taught and relevant tools and data analysis introduced for textual and visual social media data. After completing the workshop, participants will be able to analyze a wide array of social media data (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube) using the software packages Netlytic and Gephi. Participants will also learn how to create network graphs, tables and figures ready to be published in academic journals or used in conference presentations.

Participants will need to bring laptops. Participants need to create an account with Netlytic and link their Twitter, Facebook and Instagram accounts. Gephi version 0.9.0. also needs to be installed on laptops.

Dates:  4th July 09:30-12:30 & 14:30-17:30; 5th July 14:30-17:30

Dhiraj Murthy is an Associate Professor of Journalism and Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. He was previously Reader of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research explores social media, digital research methods, race/ethnicity, qualitative/mixed methods, big data quantitative analysis, and virtual organizations. Dr. Murthy has authored over 45 articles, book chapters, and papers and a book about Twitter, the first on the subject (second edition published by Polity Press, 2018). He is currently funded by the National Science Foundation’s Division Of Computer and Network Systems for pioneering work on social media use during Hurricane Harvey. Dr. Murthy’s work also uniquely explores the potential role of social technologies in diversity and community inclusion.
Dr. Murthy founded and directs the Computational Media Lab at UT Austin. He previously co-directed The Centre for Creative & Social Technologies at Goldsmiths and founded the Social Network Innovation Lab at Bowdoin College. He is chair of Social Media, Activism, and Organisations (#SMAO15) and a co-chair of Social Media & Society 2016.

Early Bird (Ends 27th of May): Students: 25€ || Academia: 50€ || Other professionals: 75€
Normal: Students: 25€ || Academia: 100€ || Other professionals: 150€