Information School News

In 2017 the London School of Economics and Political Sciences Impact Blog received a total of 1,412,929 page views. PhD student Wasim Ahmed built on his 2015 post, which was also ranked among the top read, with a follow up post in 2017. The post was titled: Using Twitter as a data source: an overview of social media research tools (updated for 2017) . The post was ranked amongst most viewed in 2017 as well as being featured in the round up of top posts about communicating research with social media . In 2017 Wasim Ahmed represented the Information School at an expert panel at the London School of Economics and Political Sciences (LSE) on the importance of promoting research beyond academia. Wasim Ahmed noted that engaging with blog led to increased page views, citations, and interest inside and outside academia related to Wasim’s PhD.

The ‘Assessing the Value of Blogs and Social Media to Research Communication and Impact’ panel was held at LSE on Wednesday 14 June at 5.00pm. The panel featured doctoral student Wasim Ahmed , from the Information School. The event was very well attended with over 70 delegates. Wasim noted that engaging with social media and blogs has the potential to generate more interest in academic work. Picture as the panel was underway. Credit: Carlos Arrébola Other panellists for the sessions included Kieran Booluck (Editor, LSE Impact blog); Chris Gilson (Editor, LSEUSAPP blog); Kathy Christian (Altmetric); Professor Daniel Miller (UCL ‘Why We Post’); Cheryl Brumley (The Economist); and Sierra Williams (Peer J). The panel was chaired by Amy Mollett (LSE Social Media Manager).

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 .

A blog post from the Information School's Dr Jo Bates has been published on the LSE Impact blog. Jo's post entitled 'Towards a critical data science - the complicated relationship between data and the democratic project' discusses the use of data science by politicians and policy makers to capture, analyse and respond to the public mood. The post considers how this development may impact on the democratic process and the full post can be viewed on the LSE blog here. Further discussion on the use of data management in US electoral campaigning can also be found in an article by Senior Lecturer Dr Gianluca Demartini at the Information School. Gianluca's article entitled 'Clinton-Sanders data breach spat goes to the heart of modern campaigning' was recently published in The Conversation.

Amplified messages: How hashtag activism and Twitter diplomacy converged at #ThisIsACoup – and won, authored by PhD student Wasim Ahmed has been published in the LSE Impact blog. The post is among the most read this week , and has drawn retweets from the mainstream media , and from local community run organisations such as @HelpSheffield . Wasim noted that the LSE impact is a fantastic platform to share blog posts, one of his previous posts has received over 13 thousand hits.

Between January and December 2015 the LSE Impact blog received over 1 million unique page hits and has released its most popular posts this year . Among the top 5 most viewed articles this year is a post by PhD student Wasim Ahmed , from the Information School. The post proved to be very popular among the social media research community, and has strengthened relationships between the Information School and industry providers of social media data.   With over a million page views this year and over 28 thousand followers on Twitter, Wasim noted that the LSE impact blog is a fantastic place to disseminate research.