Analyzing Social Media Data and Web Networks

As governments, citizens and organizations have moved online there is an increasing need for academic enquiry to adapt to this new context for communication and political action. This adaptation is crucially dependent on researchers being equipped with the necessary methodological tools to extract, analyze and visualize patterns of web activity. This volume profiles the latest techniques being employed by social scientists to collect and interpret data from some of the most popular social media applications, the political parties' own online activist spaces, and the wider system of hyperlinks that structure the inter-connections between these sites. Including contributions from a range of academic disciplines including Political Science, Media and Communication Studies, Economics, and Computer Science, this study showcases a new methodological approach that has been expressly designed to capture and analyze web data in the process of investigating substantive questions.

Marta Cantijoch is a Lecturer in Politics at the University of Manchester, UK. Also a member of the Manchester Q-Step Centre. She has published several articles on the effects of digital media on citizen politics.

Rachel Gibson is a Professor of Political Science at the University of Manchester, UK. She has held visiting positions at Universities in Australia, Germany, and Spain. She has published several books and articles on the use of digital media in political communication, particularly by parties, and for election campaigning and participation.

Stephen Ward is a Reader in Politics at the University of Salford, UK. He was previously a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. He has published widely in areas such as: political participation, campaigns and elections online along with parties' use of digital technologies.