Computational Ethnography

Description:

I am working as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the "Digital Warfare in the Sahel" project at Leiden University Institute for History. My role involves collecting data from social media, as well as performing various analyses on these data, such as network analysis and image processing. The project focuses on the Fulani communities as a case study.

Social media data:

We want to understand what kind of contents people post and talk about, compared to what we observe on the ground, from face-to-face interactions. To do so, we obtain social media data on a number of platforms to explore these differences.

Network analysis:

How are individuals, communities and even countries connected to each other? Do we find links between the homeland and diaspora communities? The patterns we find on social media seem to suggest a huge network of the Fulanis around the globe. You can find the interactive map of the network here: https://dialmatt123.github.io/sahel_facebook_network_map_97/

Image processing:

One of the challenges we face when analysing social media data is the mass amount of images posted on the pages and chat groups. Because of the sheer amount of data, it is not feasible for us to manually go through each image, then sort them by the content. To overcome this barrier, we have made use of image processing/ computer vision technology to help us gain further insights to what kind of contents different pages/ groups tend to post, and we can use these patterns to infer the orientation and audience design of these pages and groups.