At close quarters: Combatting Facebook design, features and temporalities in social research

Abstract

As researchers we often find ourselves grappling with social media platforms and data 'at close quarters'. Although social media platforms were created for purposes other than academic research-which are apparent in their architecture and temporalities-they offer opportunities for researchers to repurpose them for the collection, generation and analysis of rich datasets. At the same time, this repurposing raises an evolving range of practical and methodological challenges at the small and large scale. We draw on our experiences and empirical data from two research projects, one using Facebook Community Pages and the other repurposing Facebook Activity Logs. This article reflects critically on the specific challenges we faced using these platform features, on their common roots, and the tactics we adopted in response. De Certeau's distinction between strategy and tactics provides a useful framework for exploring these struggles as located in the practice of doing social research-which often ends up being tactical. This article argues that we have to collectively discuss, demystify and devise tactics to mitigate the strategies and temporalities deeply embedded in platforms, corresponding as far as possible to the temporalities and the aims of our research. Although combat at close quarters is inevitable in social media research, dialogue between researchers is more than ever needed to tip the scales in our favour.

Applications of Natural Language Processing in Bilingual Language Teaching: An Indonesian-English Case Study

“…Losing the context of data is not an "obscure problem apparent to a few philosophers focused on cy-132 bernetics" (Bornakke and Due, 2018, p. 1). In this paper, we highlight the importance of decisions about 'what data to lose' when transcribing, making tactical decisions that are justified by research questions (Gangneux and Docherty, 2018), and how transcription bias can be multiplied in unknown ways by computational processes.…”

Proceedings of the Fifteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications

“…Losing the context of data is not an "obscure problem apparent to a few philosophers focused on cy-bernetics" (Bornakke and Due, 2018, p. 1). In this paper, we highlight the importance of decisions about 'what data to lose' when transcribing, making tactical decisions that are justified by research questions (Gangneux and Docherty, 2018), and how transcription bias can be multiplied in unknown ways by computational processes.…”

“…With these features put together over thousands, possibly millions of teaching decisions each lesson, we were cautious in our asking our teacher participant to recall or explain what they were doing in retrospect. We noted that any disparity in teacher intention and the recorded data, or inability to recall the purpose of specific interactions, language choices and other behaviors may create an air of scrutiny which could skew resulting interpretation (Gangneux and Docherty, 2018).…”

Daily Practices and Processes of Territorialization of Settlers in Querência Do Norte, Paraná, Brazil

“…Tactics, in turn, are the expedients employed by the ordinary man since he is not an owner and operates blow-by-blow in another's space in an astute, stealthy, and incremental manner. If, on the one hand, the strategy is a victory of the place over time, considering that this individual has no place, tactics are, on the other hand, the victory of time over place, of the individual over himself (De Certeau, 2014;Munro, 2017;Frers & Meier, 2017;Nielsen & Langstrup, 2018;Gangneux & Docherty, 2018).…”