In the wake of the 2018 Facebook–Cambridge Analytica scandal, social media companies began restricting academic researchers’ access to the easiest, most reliable means of systematic data collection ...via their application programming interfaces (APIs). Although these restrictions have been decried widely by digital researchers, in this essay, I argue that relatively little has changed. The underlying relationship between researchers, the platforms, and digital data remains largely the same. The platforms and their APIs have always been proprietary black boxes, never intended for scholarly use. Even when researchers could mine data seemingly endlessly, we rarely knew what type or quality of data were at hand. Moreover, the largesse of the API era allowed many researchers to conduct their work with little regard for the rigor, ethics, or focus on societal value, we should expect from scholarly inquiry. In other words, our digital research processes and output have not always occupied the high ground. Rather than viewing 2018 and Cambridge Analytica as a profound disjuncture and loss, I suggest that digital researchers need to take a more critical look at how our community collected and analyzed data when it still seemed so plentiful, and use these reflections to inform our approaches going forward.
Social media are frequently touted for their potential to strengthen democratic processes by bringing politicians and citizens into dialogue with one another. Social media may enrich the public ...sphere and improve democratic decision-making by allowing politicians and constituents to discuss matters of political import directly, free from intermediaries. But what factors impact whether this potential is realized? Previous research has focused on politicians’ structural incentives for strategic communication online but neglected the impact of citizen demand for politicians’ attention. I examine the role of citizen demand using an original dataset comprising the Twitter activity from and to members of the lower legislative houses in the Netherlands, United Kingdom, and United States during the latter half of October 2013. The data suggest that citizen demand plays a crucial role in determining the presence, as well as the extent, of politicians’ reciprocal engagement with members of the public.
Independent researchers’ access to digital platform data is critical for our understanding of the online world; yet recent reflections have shown that data are not always readily available (Asbjørn ...Møller & Bechmann, 2019; Bruns, 2018; Tromble, 2021). In the face of platform power to determine data accessibility, academics can often feel powerless, but opportunities and openings can emerge for scholars to shape practice. In this article, we examine the potential for academics to engage with non-academic audiences in debates around increased data access. Adopting an autoethnographic approach, we draw on our personal experiences working with policymakers and digital platforms to offer advice for academics seeking to shape debates and advocate for change. Presenting vignettes that detail our experiences and drawing on existing scholarship on how to engage with non-academic audiences, we outline the opportunities and challenges in this kind of engagement with a view to guiding other scholars interested in engaging in this space.
In this article we describe our experiences with computational text analysis involving rich social and cultural concepts. We hope to achieve three primary goals. First, we aim to shed light on thorny ...issues not always at the forefront of discussions about computational text analysis methods. Second, we hope to provide a set of key questions that can guide work in this area. Our guidance is based on our own experiences and is therefore inherently imperfect. Still, given our diversity of disciplinary backgrounds and research practices, we hope to capture a range of ideas and identify commonalities that resonate for many. This leads to our final goal: to help promote interdisciplinary collaborations. Interdisciplinary insights and partnerships are essential for realizing the full potential of any computational text analysis involving social and cultural concepts, and the more we bridge these divides, the more fruitful we believe our work will be.
In a time of rapid, globalized communication, what are the possibilities for truly meaningful cross-cultural political dialogue? Optimists contend that we may now speak of transnational public ...spheres—of spaces in which people reach across national boundaries to engage one another on issues of common concern. Skeptics, on the other hand, maintain that political, cultural, and linguistic barriers continue to preclude truly meaningful transnational discourse. And in the wake of 9/11 and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, many express specific skepticism about the potential for Western and Muslim societies to bridge such divides. Yet littie systematic empirical research investigates the realities of cross-national dialogue, particularly between Western and non-Western societies. Using an original dataset produced via content analysis of British and Pakistani newspapers, we examine the discursive links formed during a quintessential transnational media event: the 2005-2006 Danish Muhammad cartoon controversy. Comparing the frames deployed and actors engaged in each of these countries, we find clear evidence of genuine transnational engagement between Muslims and non-Muslims. And though the scope of our data limits our findings, they nonetheless provide a sense of cautious optimism regarding the potential for the formation of transnational public spheres.
This article articulates why the lack of social media platform data access for researchers is a huge problem, for research and society. We then review a number of ongoing initiatives and ...opportunities towards ensuring sustainable data accees.
In the early years, researchers greeted the internet and digital data with almost wide-eyed wonder and excitement. The opportunities provided by digital media such as websites, bulletin boards, and ...blogs—and later by social media platforms and mobile apps—seemed nearly endless, and researchers were suddenly awash in data. The bounty was so great that it required new methods for processing, organizing, and analysis. Yet in all the excitement, it seems that the digital research community largely lost sight of something fundamental: a sense of what all these data actually represent. In this essay, I argue that moving forward, researchers need to take a critical look into, be more open about, and develop better approaches for drawing inferences and larger meaning from digital data. I suggest that we need to more closely interrogate what these data represent in at least two senses: statistical and contextual. In the former instance I call for much greater modesty in digital social research. In the latter, I call for heuristic models that permit bolder, more robust comparisons throughout our work.
Religion and ethnicity are inextricably linked in discourse within and about Central Asia. One common narrative suggests that as a result of differences between historically sedentary and nomadic ...populations, ethnic Tajiks and Uzbeks are naturally more religious and more likely to radicalize than their Kazakh and Kyrgyz neighbors. Using extensive data available from the Pew Research Center's 2012 The World's Muslims survey, this study examines whether such claims stand up to empirical scrutiny. The data cast doubt on simplified versions of this discourse and suggest that future analyses should focus attention on individual-level explanations rather than potentially essentializing group-based narratives.
The 2005 Danish cartoon crisis has been the topic of much discussion among political science scholars. In September 2011 we ran a symposium on Jytte Klausen’s The Cartoons That Shook the World that ...centered on the tensions between multiculturalism, civility, and freedom of expression disclosed by the controversy. Paul M. Sniderman, Michael Bang Petersen, Rune Slothuus, and Rune Stubager’s Paradoxes of Liberal Democracy: Islam, Western Europe, and the Danish Cartoon Crisis (Princeton 2014) revisits the Danish crisis. Drawing on randomized experiments linked to broader survey research, the authors offer a nuanced account of Danish public opinion, and argue that the sensitivity of Danes to civil liberties concerns explains why the cartoon controversy did not result in an anti-Muslim backlash. The topic, the argument, and the methodology are important, and so we have invited a range of political science scholars to review the book. — Jeffrey C. Isaac
Since independence, Kyrgyzstani leaders have used Islamic identity as a tool for nation-building. While embracing Islam as a marker of Kyrgyz nationhood, however, they have simultaneously sought to ...limit its role in political life. The resulting discourse draws a sharp dichotomy between "good", "local" forms of Islam and "bad", "foreign" manifestations. Unfortunately, the latter, "bad" forms are frequently linked to Kyrgyzstan's largest minority population: ethnic Uzbeks. Drawing on, and adding insights to, the theory of securitisation forwarded by the Copenhagen School of security studies, this article examines how and why religion and ethnicity have become intertwined in Kyrgyzstani discourse.
PDF
