Ethical Approaches to Social Media Data Collection & Publication

Are you taking a course or conducting research where you are working with social media data? Have you noticed the unchallenged embrace of "Big" social media data within scholarly research? If so, then this instructional module is for you and anyone who is interested in utilizing social media data for scholarly research purposes. The module is divided into three units and will begin with a discussion of personal archiving practices on social media, and then shift its focus to Twitter and what collecting data from its platform may look like. The last unit looks at ethical handling of social media data. The module should be done in the sequential order it is presented in, beginning with Unit I. No prior experience is required.

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this tutorial, you will have

• Identified and reflected upon your personal archiving practices on your social media accounts

• Learned about web-scraping techniques in the context of Twitter

• Identified ways to prepare your collected social media data for research & publication purposes