Social media Microscope
"The Social Media Macroscope, the SMM is a science gateway with a goal of removing the limitation and making social media data, analytics and visualization tools accessible to researchers and students of all levels of expertise. The SMM provides a single point of access to a suite of intuitive web interfaces for performing social media data collection, analysis, and visualization via open-source and commercial tools."
The world creates social data. The macroscope is something in-between a telescope and microscope that allows people to do research. Broadly defining research is that anybody that wants to analyze data specifically to figure out various questions on their end, that's research and the Social Media Macroscope can be used to do that.
This is two-dimensional graph that explains how the macroscope benefits individuals that are focused on applying computational methods to social research questions using social data, but may not necessarily want to deal with programming or may not even have a programming background.
Eg. Sentiment analysis using Facebook/Twitter vs sentiment analysis using Python/R
Now we also have computer scientists that participate in this project, and you may ask, "Well, why do they need the Social Media Macroscope since they are in natively, inherently programmers, and that's what they're comfortable with?"
The macroscope is also beneficial for those with computational backgrounds because:
The world creates social data. The macroscope is something in-between a telescope and microscope that allows people to do research. Broadly defining research is that anybody that wants to analyze data specifically to figure out various questions on their end, that's research and the Social Media Macroscope can be used to do that.
This is two-dimensional graph that explains how the macroscope benefits individuals that are focused on applying computational methods to social research questions using social data, but may not necessarily want to deal with programming or may not even have a programming background.
Eg. Sentiment analysis using Facebook/Twitter vs sentiment analysis using Python/R
Now we also have computer scientists that participate in this project, and you may ask, "Well, why do they need the Social Media Macroscope since they are in natively, inherently programmers, and that's what they're comfortable with?"
The macroscope is also beneficial for those with computational backgrounds because:
- It gives a breath of social media data access that as we get more and more researchers that are working within the platform, they might be putting some of their datasets that they are allowed to with permission and put into the macroscope, and so that enables other computational researchers to have access to more data, as well as on the bottom axis, ability to test and house customized models.
- Moreover, in the computer science realm, there are several algorithms and models that are being published, coming out and put on GitHubs and academic papers being published alongside them, but they're very hard to actually install and run. The vision with SMM was that it could become the place where these cutting edge algorithms are installed so that those with or without programming backgrounds can more easily run those models without having to go through all of these GitHubs and trying to figure out how to install the code. It becomes a place for computer scientists to really display and test their models.