Research Update 3: To the field!

I did it. This spring I went out and spoke to people. Real, actual, breathing human beings. In the flesh.

I am really interested in how people are (or are not) making use of social media tools in their everyday political lives. I am particularly interested in those politicos who can’t seem to get enough information about current affairs and always seem to be in the know – but – who are not professional political players. I am talking about opinion leaders. They are the ones always telling you about what the next important policy decision is, how Canada should be dealing with climate change, whether a gun registry is good or bad, etc..

So, this spring I left my cozy (read: overly hot and poorly ventilated) Oxford workspace and headed home. I traveled across Canada to speak to 23 opinion leaders from four different cities/areas: Halifax, Toronto, Edmonton, Vancouver/Victoria. Here are some things I learned:

• Fieldwork is exhausting, possibly more exhausting than the other kind of work on fields I do (which is really saying something if you have ever played 80 minutes of rugby). I made the mistake of thinking, oh, my interviews should take about 1.5-2 hours, I’ll book off 2.25 hours and be fine. No. I needed 3 hours in the room and then a good long run (or Netflix marathon) to recuperate after each.
• People like to tell stories, even when they have nothing to do with your questions. Some times these stories are really interesting. Some times you inadvertently find out that a person’s everyday political chat has been digital since the 80s and that your interviewee is part of a discussion group that transitioned from BBS to listserv to private Facebook group. Other times you learn a person recently lost their main weed supplier.
• Prepare to be flexible. Times change right up to the last minute, technology fails right before you are about to start the interview, people just can’t wrap their head around what you are trying to get them to do – there are a lot of reasons to be very prepared for the interview to take a very different path than originally planned. Rather than an interview schedule and notes sheet I thought of the paper on my clipboard as a data container. The pages were partitioned according to the information I needed to gather so that if things went off track I knew exactly which holes I needed to go back and fill before time ran out.

With the interviews complete I am now diving into data analysis. I’ve got NVivo for Mac set up and the first of my interviews have been coded. The schedule is, of course, a bit of a mess at this point – but the initial themes are intriguing and everyday there is very tangible progress to be chronicled.

It is a very different feeling than days of familiarizing your self with the literature. It is exhilarating.

Research Update 2: Summer at the Social Media Lab

From being cited in an Anonymous press release and speaking live on Sun TV, to attending my first slue of conferences and giving my first public lecture, this summer certainly has been full of excitement!

Last I checked in I’d just completed my Transfer of Status, the first milestone in my PhD program. I left Oxford for the summer, sites set on home (Nova Scotia, Canada), where I took up a position as a Visiting Scholar at the Dalhousie Social Media Lab from the end of June through to the beginning of October.

While at the Lab I focused primarily on my own work including preparing for multiple conferences and identifying my list of potential interviewees. I was very fortunate to have been welcomed with open arms — I had the opportunity to present my early thesis work to faculty and students within the Computer Science Faculty, the Information Management Faculty, and to political science undergraduate students.

I also helped the Social Media Lab organize their annual conference, this year called the Social Media and Society 2013 Conference. (I presented work Devin Gaffney and I have been doing on identifying influentials in Twitter networks).

Most recently, I took the lead on the Twitter analysis of the Nova Scotia Election, at the Social Media Lab. We wrote a number of blogs (here, here, and here), and will hopefully produce an academic paper in the coming months.

If there is a single lesson to be learned from this summer, I think it is the importance of connecting with people from all over. Every time I said yes to an interview, a conference, or a speaking engagement, I met new and interesting people with new and interesting perspectives. I’ve been able to start to build a base which can be hard to do when you get stuck in the Oxford bubble.

One of the things that makes me a particularly efficient DPhil student is my focus. When I set out a list of goals for myself I commit fully to the tasks required to achieve those goals. It is easy to spend hours in the office only to be so exhausted at the end of the day I can barely drag myself to rugby training and then home to bed. The last thing I want to do is go to a lecture (however interesting it may be) or a reception (regardless of what yummy treats are on offer) where I have to look presentable and say semi-intelligent things.

Clearly those periods of intense focus are important, but connecting with others – that is a big part of what I want to do also. If I want to help bridge the gap between academic and the general public, I need to be able to find times and places that facilitate that interaction. This summer has been a wonderful step in that direction.

Up next?

I am back in Oxford running Research Methods workshops for MSc students here at the OII, working as a Research Assistant on Bill Dutton’s Fifth Estate project, and working on the literature review and methods chapters of my thesis.

I’ve been taking a quick picture of all the workspaces of my PhD. This is my desk at Dal.

Research Update 1: Transfer Successful!

At Oxford the first big milestone of the PhD process is called the “Transfer of Status.” When you start your PhD, called a DPhil here, you enter as a “Probationary Research Student” and are required to submit a 6000 word proposal (among other things) in order to prove you are capable completing PhD level research – you deserve the title “DPhil Candidate.”

I submitted my proposal in May, had my interview in June, and have just been told I passed (woohoo). This means I get to move forward with my research and can get working on data collection. What, you ask, was the contents of this passing proposal?

Well, I am interested in the ways in which citizens engage (or don’t) in politics and political discussions with each other. I care a lot about how we interact with each other and what that means for our political system. I am also fascinated by digital technology and how it can be used to communicate political messages.

What this boils down to, in my case, is an in-depth analysis of how 20 specific Twitter users talk about politics in their daily lives and with those in their personal networks. I am going to ask them questions about who they talk to, what tools they use to communicate (for example, Twitter, face-to-face conversation, telephone), what issues they care about, and what strategies they use to convince other people that those issues are important or of particular views on those issues.

But I am getting ahead of myself, how do I select those 20 individuals?  To solve this problem I am working with Devin Gaffney on two projects.

The first is a journal article for American Behavioral Scientist where we look at the most common ways used to identify influentials on Twitter. We show that none of the standards, like network centrality or number of re-tweets, quite do the trick. These methods all identify public influentials and not average, but politically engaged, citizens.

The next is a conference paper for the Social Media and Society conference to be held at Dalhousie University in September 2013. In this study we will compare a range of ways to identify those average citizens. A big part of this project is an online survey which we will be sending out to users of the #CDNpoli hastag over the next few weeks. Once the survey is complete we will use some social network analysis techniques and some content analysis techniques to describe the community of Twitter users talking about Canadian politics. At the end of all of that I will finally have my sampling frame!

It is quite the process, but I am excited.

Here’s hoping some of you find it interesting too!