Digital Social Research Tools, Tension Indicators and Safer Communities: a demonstration of the Cardiff Digital Research Platform (CDRP)

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This demonstrator project will develop software tools for harvesting data from social media sites (such as facebook) focusing, in particular, on how such data can be automatically aggregated and stored for subsequent analysis. The demonstrator will make use of an existing API to ensure an early prototype is available to start the pilot study (in tension indicators/community cohesion indicators), followed by further refinement of the prototype alongside the Cardiff Digital Research Platform (CDRP -- described in appendix 1, figure 1 in the case for support). The tools implemented within the demonstrator are therefore part of the larger CDRP, intending to provide a software infrastructure for supporting data collection and analysis (covering both data analytics and visualisation) from real time on-line sources, along with traditional Web-based sources and expert curated data collections (provided and managed by government agencies). The tools will be validated in a "community cohesion" pilot study by focusing on particular social media sources. The tools being developed in the project are general in scope and can be utilised in other areas within social sciences and can be adapted to address other research questions. The project is also intended to demonstrate how social media data can be combined with data from official sources (such as the Office of National Statistics) to support social sciences research. The outcome of the pilot study is intended to highlight the benefits and limitations of using social media data and in particular how such an approach can translate to other areas of social sciences research where social media data (often of limited quality and "messy") can augment expert curated data (obtained through "traditional" questionnaire and field-based activities). The deliverables from the project will include software tools for harvesting data from social network sites and an online guide outlining the use of such tools within a pilot study, highlighting particular lessons learned from this process which could translate to other areas within social sciences and beyond (such as methodological, technical, ethical and privacy issues). In particular, the project will demonstrate how the CDRP enables the analysis of information fed through social media in 'real-time' (and, therefore, the rapid and multiple testing of propositions about the frequency, distribution and content of social media communications) whilst also archiving this data in ways that can be stored by the ESRC and subject to secondary data analysis by subsequent users (see also, the 'data management plan' for the project). This demonstrator also provides the basis for undertaking further study on issues of: (i) data quality arising from the use of social media data and (ii) privacy and user engagement in supporting social media data analytics and trending.