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Archiving information from geotagged tweets to promote reproducibility and comparability in social media research
[journal article]
Abstract Sharing social media research datasets allows for reproducibility and peer-review, but it is very often difficult or even impossible to achieve due to legal restrictions and can also be ethically questionable. What is more, research data repositories and other research infrastructure and research su... view more
Sharing social media research datasets allows for reproducibility and peer-review, but it is very often difficult or even impossible to achieve due to legal restrictions and can also be ethically questionable. What is more, research data repositories and other research infrastructure and research support institutions are only starting to target social media researchers. In this paper, we present a practical solution to sharing social media data with the help of a social science data archive. Our aim is to contribute to the effort of enhancing comparability and reproducibility in social media research by taking some first steps towards setting standards for sustainable data archiving. We present a showcase for sharing social media data with the example of a big dataset containing geotagged tweets (several months of continued geotagged tweets from the United States from 2014 and 2015; nearly half a billion tweets in total) through a research data archive. We provide a general background to the process of long-term archiving of research data. After some consideration of the current obstacles for sharing and archiving social media data, we present our solution of archiving the specific dataset of geotagged tweets at the GESIS Data Archive for the Social Sciences, a publicly funded German data archive for secure and long-term archiving of social science data. We archived and documented tweet IDs and additional information to improve reproducibility of the initial research while also attending to ethical and legal considerations, and taking into account Twitter’s terms of service in particular.... view less
Keywords
social media; data capture; data storage; data bank; archives; data protection
Classification
Information and Documentation, Libraries, Archives
Methods and Techniques of Data Collection and Data Analysis, Statistical Methods, Computer Methods
Free Keywords
data archiving; data sharing; ethics; social media data; Twitter; geo-data
Document language
English
Publication Year
2017
Page/Pages
p. 1-14
Journal
Big Data & Society (2017) Jul.-Dec.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951717736336
ISSN
2053-9517
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed
Licence
Creative Commons - Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0