Facilitating social media research in social sciences

Our project - Chorus Twitter - aims to facilitate social media research in social science (and other non-technical disciplines) by merging new and existing methods from the computer sciences with the requirements and methodologies of the social sciences. The Chorus initiative began in 2011, having its origins in two projects that were being undertaken at Brunel University – MATCH, a research programme investigating wide ranging issues around medical device manufacture, and FoodRisC (www.foodrisc.org), a European initiative directed towards improving risk communication around food issues. More recently, we have adapted our software to investigate the process of online radicalisation.

Chorus comprises two main tools: Tweetcatcher, for retrieving data from the Twitter API, and Tweetvis, for analysing and visualising the semantic and temporal properties of this data. Chorus tools have been used extensively for research and teaching both at Brunel and many other organisations across the UK and the rest of the world. For instance, here at Brunel, undergraduate students have successfully used Tweetcatcher as part of an introduction to data analysis. More broadly, Chorus has been used by thousands of students and professionals worldwide who require free, easy, non-programmatic access to social media data. For instance, we know of over 47 publications that describe or use Chorus in some way.

We continue to develop the code-base underpinning Chorus and are planning to release new tools and publications over the coming years. Current areas of development focus on improving the scope, flexibility and accessibility of retrieval and processing functionality, including access to new media resources and algorithms for detecting, profiling and tracking online communities.

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Publications:

• Beretta, Valentina, Maccagnola, D., Cribbin, T., & Messina, E. (2015). An interactive method for inferring demographic attributes in Twitter. Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media, 113–122.

• Brooker, P., Barnett, J., Cribbin, T., Lang, A., & Martin, J. (2014). User-driven data capture: Locating and analysing Twitter conversation about cystic fibrosis without keywords. In SAGE Research Methods Cases. Retrieved from

• Brooker, P., Barnett, J., Cribbin, T., & Sharma, S. (2016). Have we even solved the first ‘big data challenge?’ Practical issues concerning data collection and visual representation for social media analytics. In H. Snee, C. Hine, Y. Morey, S. Roberts, & H. Watson (Eds.), Digital Methods for Social Science: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Research Innovation. Retrieved from

• Brooker, Phillip, Barnett, J., & Cribbin, T. (2016). Doing social media analytics. Big Data & Society, 3(2), 1–12.

Meet the Principal Investigator(s) for the project

Dr Timothy Cribbin - I am an information scientist with interests and expertise in information visualisation, interactive search UIs and text analytics. I was awarded a BSc (Hons) Psychology from the University of Portsmouth in 1994 and an MSc Industrial Psychology from the University of Hull in 1996. In 2006, I was awarded a PhD from Brunel University London for research exploring the use of spatial-semantic interfaces for exploratory document search. After working as a researcher for several years, I was appointed as a lecturer here at the Department of Computer Science (formerly DISC) in 2001. I have taught a wide range of subjects, at undergraduate and postgraduate level, including information visualization, human-computer interaction, statistics, databases and programming. I have worked on a number of funded projects during my career, primarily researching new methods and applications of visual text analytics in diverse areas such as requirements elicitation for end-user medical devices and the online development of radical/extremist group identities. I am a founder and lead programmer on the Chorus Twitter analytics project. I have published widely over a number of topics including document similarity modelling and visualization, social media analytics, citation-based search user interfaces and science mapping. I regularly act as reviewer for many conferences and journals in the areas of information science, social media analytics and information visualisation.

Related Research Group(s)

Interactive Multimedia Systems - Building sensor and media-rich, cross-layer, inclusive e-systems, with an interest in human-machine interaction, sensorial-based interfaces, data visualisation and multimedia.

Project last modified 19/10/2021