CaSMa: Citizen-centric approaches to Social Media Analysis

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The spread of the Internet into nearly every aspect of our daily lives has stimulated the growth of a vibrant and expanding set of systems to support social interaction via a range of internet connected devices. Often collectively referred to as social media this set of applications and services are undergoing a highly unstable and dynamic growth as society shapes and is shaped by the emergence of these new capabilities. The sheer volume of users of these systems and the diversity of people using social media make it immediately appealing as means of gaining insight and understanding into human behaviour. To gain insight and understanding researchers have exploited a variety of data analytic techniques and from a variety of social science disciplines. These have been used, for example, to automatically derive users' personality traits , predict and even influence societal outcomes , and to provide accounts of critical societal events (e.g. the London Riots , the Arab Spring ). While the emergence of 'big data' that has been generated on the basis of human behaviour is increasingly being recognized as a major business and societal asset, there is a growing public concern over the exploitation of such data.Building on the work carried out in the Horizon Digital Economy hub we will develop a set of services and facilities for the social sciences that will allow researchers to draw upon social media and associated human data to gain insights into human behaviour in a manner that is ethically sound. To this end we will closely align the development of new tools and facilities with a series of social science explorations that use the emerging tools and develop them in an iterative manner. The resulting tools and facilities will be introduced to the broader social science community through a series of master classes events that will discuss their use. The process of iterative refinement and release will be complemented by a series of ethical and policy debates to elaborate the handling of Human Data.