Project 4: Social Media Analytics

URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/S_P4SMA

Course Objective

Upon completion of this course, the student is able to:
• give an overview of the state of the art of tools and methods for analyzing social media;
• list the strengths and limitations of methods for analysing social media, and position these methods within the broader framework of research methodology in the field of communication science;
• collect and analyze large amounts of information from social media;
• formulate research questions based on existing research, and answer these question using social media analysis;
• reflect on the reliability and validity of the used methods;
• present the findings obtained through analysis and reflection in a clear and concise manner, and connect these findings to existing theory.

Course Content

Today, people of all ages use social media to communicate with both acquaintances and strangers, and are also exposed through these channels to news, PR and marketing. As communication on these social media is often public, researchers and stakeholders have unprecedented possibilities to monitor and analyze communication and interaction on these platforms, and thereby study how users respond to messages and each other. This type of research, here referred to as social media analytics, can give us insight in the behavior and attitudes of these users, which can be of use to researchers, press officers and marketeers, among others. Furthermore, by using existing data, social media analytics is fast, relatively cheap, and enables research on a very large scale. However, there are also downsides and limitations to social media analytics: how representative is this data? And are we actually allowed to just collect and analyze all information that people put online? In this course we give a practical introduction in tools and techniques for monitoring and analyzing social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter. Using existing tools, students will practice with collecting and analyzing social media messages. Students will work in teams, on assignments that are linked to the three Social Sciences for Society themes. Based on theories studied in other courses, on the topics of globalization, diversity and the network society, students will formulate research questions, and then answer these questions with the help of social media analytics. In particular, attention will be paid to the workings, reliability and validity of measurements: How do common techniques like sentiment analysis and attention measurements actually work, how reliability are they, and how can we improve them?

Teaching Methods

Lectures and practicals

Method of Assessment

Examination is on the basis of interim written assignments and a finalwritten assignment, made in teams. A condition for receiving the grade for this course is that the requirements for the Mentorship Communication Science year 2 course are satisfied.

Literature

Manuals developed for this course, provided on Canvas.

Target Audience

Second year bachelor Communication Science