Information School News

Senior Lecturer Dr Paul Reilly will give a talk entitled  Digital Contention in a divided society: social media, parades and protests in Northern Ireland on the 25th February, 4-5pm, for the Interdisciplinary Digital Research Group at Dublin City University. The talk is part of their 2021 Hybrid Research Seminar Series, featuring new books and research projects in the interdisciplinary space of humanities and social sciences. How are platforms such as Facebook and Twitter used by citizens to frame contentious parades and protests in ‘post-conflict’ Northern Ireland? What do these contentious episodes tell us about the potential of information and communication technologies to promote positive intergroup contact in the deeply divided society? These are the questions addressed in the talk. Register to attend this event (via Zoom) here: https://dcu-ie.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lHqPCJ4LRoO-bl-thpOUfw

Extract taken from the LSE Impact blog: Following his initial post on this topic in 2015, Wasim Ahmed has updated and expanded his rundown of the tools available to social scientists looking to analyse social media data. A number of new applications have been released in the intervening period, with the increasing complexity of certain research questions also having prompted some tools to increase their data retrieval functionalities. Although platforms such as Facebook and WhatsApp have more active users, Twitter’s unique infrastructure and the near-total availability of its data have ensured its popularity among researchers remains high. You can read the full post here .