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Abstract
Social media have become an important component of contemporary information ecosystems. People use social media systems, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Tumblr to communicate ideas and information needs, seek advice and solve problems, show appreciation and disagreement with a person or issue. These tools facilitate the emergence of communities, often resembling the communities of practice that arise in workplaces and educational institutions, where a common interest, identity and set of norms and structures for communicating develop through interaction. But while it seems easy to "suck in" data streams from social media to understand online communities, making sense of the vast data sets has been challenging. The issues include not just the tools and methods for extracting and synthesizing large data sets like the Twitter Firehose, they also extend to the ethical and responsible use and reporting of this data for academic and commercial purposes.
This panel will focus on methodological approaches and research strategies for the study of social media communities, in particular web 2.0 tools that play an important role in the North American cultural landscape.
Recommended Citation
Chen, H., Gruzd, A., Liu, X., & Meyers, E. (2012). Understanding Information and Knowledge Sharing in Online Communities: Emerging Research Approaches. Proceedings of the 75th ASIS&T Annual Meeting (2012, Baltimore, MD), 49(1) John Wiley & Sons Inc..
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1002/meet.14504901034
Meeting Name
75th Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2012 ASIS&T (2012: Oct. 28-31, Baltimore, MD)
Department(s)
Library and Learning Resources
Keywords and Phrases
Online communities; Research methods; Social media; User generated content
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
0044-7870; 1550-8390
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Final Version
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2012 Hsin-liang Chen and Yin Zhang, All rights reserved.
