Manchester Digital Media Network
Workshop 2: Methods and Challenges of Researching Social Networking Sites
Tuesday 20 March, 9:30am - 5pm
Room G306a, Jean MacFarlane Building
A postgraduate workshop organised by the Manchester Digital Media Network (MDMN) and the Research Institute for Cosmopolitan Cultures (RICC) and sponsored by methods@manchester.
Social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter, are now widely used in everyday activities for both work and leisure. As a result, they are also increasingly used in social science research, whether as a site or object of research, or as a tool to recruit research participants or disseminate one’s work. Yet, there is no single methodology for studying SNS, nor an established methodological ‘toolkit’. The aim of the workshop will be precisely to try and create such a toolkit, firstly by mapping several possible approaches to SNS (qualitative and quantitative) and familiarising the participants with available software to apply some of these approaches. Secondly, the workshop will showcase several research projects that are at the forefront of developing new methods to studying Facebook and Twitter, by inviting leading international scholars in the field. Lastly, the workshop will offer an opportunity for participants to discuss their own work, receive feedback and develop their own methodological tools.
This full day workshop will have three leading national and international experts as well as a session with short presentations by some of the MDMN members.
Timetable
| 9.15-9.45 | Registration |
| 9.45-10.00 | Introduction and welcome |
| 10-11.15 | Masterclass 1 (Daniel Miller) |
| 11.15-11.45 | Tea/coffee break |
| 11.45-1.00 | Masterclass 2 (Terri Senft) |
| 1.00-2.00 | Lunch |
| 2.00-3.15 | Masterclass 3 (Debra Ferreday) |
| 3.15-3.45 | Tea/coffee break |
| 3.45-5.00 | Participant Presentation Session |
Masterclass 1
Prof Daniel Miller, University College London
First Trinidad, next the world
Normally I avoid all discussion of methodology and my account of how I ended up writing an
anthropological book about Facebook in Trinidad will be a lesson in why that is the case. At this
point, however, I have just obtained a 2.5 million Euro grant for ethnographic fieldwork on social
networking in seven countries and I realise that I may have to start thinking more systematically and
seriously about collaborative and comparative ethnography of social networking use, a problem I am
happy to share at this point.
Masterclass 2
Dr Terri Senft, New York University
Facing the Other in Digital Space: Ethics, Flesh, Image, Icon
My talk focuses on three types of faces all digital ethnographers invariably wind up negotiating in
their work: the physical face, the photographic likeness, and the digital image-as-icon. Who owns
these? Who has permission to speak about them? As researchers, how should we respond when
images “speak back” to us—when the people connected to these faces tell stories that contradict,
contest, or simply muddy narratives that have been told on their behalf? To ground discussion, I will
focus on three cases I've explored in my own research: the video of the murder of Iranian Nega Agha
Soltan; the story of Neda Soltani, whose face was repeatedly mistaken in social networks and in the
press for the "real Neda"; and finally, the use of "Neda imagery" in a recent feature film described
as" a love story tangled up in history and steeped in Internet."
Masterclass 3
Dr Debra Ferreday, University of Lancaster
‘We Know Drama’: researching affect and belonging on a closed social networking site
This session will explore the methodological challenges involved in researching the ways in which
affects circulate in social networking sites. Much of the existing media and cultural studies literature
on social networking focusses on public global networks such as Facebook and Twitter. Recent
research on social networks has focussed on the ways in which ‘new’ technologies resist or are appropriated by mainstream media and corporate interests. At the same time, questions of cyberbullying
are at the forefront of mainstream media discussions of SNA. This session aims to engage
with some of these questions by focussing on a case study of political ‘cyberdrama’ on an online
fibre arts site, I explore the question of how a cultural studies methodology might account for
regimes of belonging, affect and marginality in online space.