The Centre for the Analysis of Social Media
The Centre for the Analysis of Social Media (CASM) is a collaboration between Demos and the Text Analytics Group at the University of Sussex. It produces new political, social and policy insight and understanding through social media research which combines new technologies with the social sciences.
Social media is the largest, richest, and most dynamic evidence base for human behaviour, and brings new opportunities to understand groups, movements and society. Social media analytics – the automated collection and analysis of millions of people talking and arguing with one another – has already revolutionised marketing and advertising.
It could revolutionise policy and social research work too. However, as it stands, the current field of social media analytics is inadequate for policy makers: standards of evidence and methodological rigour are not high enough to influence decision or policy-making. Samples of convenience often produce ‘raw’ metrics with no further corroboration, explanation or interpretation. Considerations of culture, context, group, language and psychology are rare, and the ethics of social media research even rarer.
Our unique approach aims to bring different disciplines together to make real world sense of social media data, and to build useable technology that puts the power of computational techniques in the hands of the end-user – the expert, decision-maker, citien analyst or social scientist.
CASM, in collaboration with a wide network of experts and leaders in the field, combines natural language processing, machine learning, statistics, data visuals, grounded theory and ethnography in order to develop large scale social media analysis as a valid instrument of research is ethical, reliable, and useable.
Research Areas
CASM is currently working on the following project areas:
- Social media as a gauge of public opinion: CASM is working with Ipsos MORI to develop new technology and methods that use social media as a robust form of attitudinal data in opinion polling and survey work.
- Understanding data dashboards: increasingly we make sense of ‘big data’ via dashboards that curate and present the data we access. This work examines the affect dashboards have on decision making.
- Software development for early detection of emerging events: reporting from citizen journalists on platforms like Twitter often pre-empts mainstream news. This work aims to construct usable software that can cut through millions of irrelevant tweets to quickly identify emerging events as they happen and present them to those who need to know.
- E-health research: millions of people now go online to seek, share and create information about their health conditions. This could potentially be a valuable new form of patient and citizen feedback about health service quality, current provision gaps, emerging needs and trends.
- Security, ethics and privacy in a digital world: existing guidelines for research ethics can’t always be applied to social media research. Existing legislation which covers how public bodies access personal data online is outdated. We develop methods and techniques of how to conduct social media research according to strict ethical and legal principles that respect the rights of those being researched.
- Digital democracy: the internet and social media offers an opportunity for closing the gap between representatives and citizens. However, whilst social media is increasingly being leveraged for electioneering advantage, it is not paying full democratic dividends. A suite of different initiatives have been tried and often fail. Digital technologies have had little formal impact on political decision-making, and there are no few effective opportunities for people to use digital technology to have a say in decisions that affect them. CASM is scoping the opportunities to include digital technologies within the political making process to close the gap between citizens and politicians, and ultimately create a democratic institution fit for an increasingly digital populace in the twenty-first century.
- Public responses to announcements, speeches and events: polls and surveys that rely on asking explicit questions suffer a number of biases. This project aims to understand, in real-time, how online populations react to external stimuli, and how this can inform our understanding of the offline groups from which they are drawn.
OUTPUTS
We have recently completed several research reports and outputs on these themes, including:
- A Question of Trust: how to measure and understand trust in people, governments and politicians from Twitter.
- Vox Digitas: how to understand attitudes from Twitter. Real-time analysis of political events – including the Euro debate between Nick Clegg and Nigel Farage, the Independence Referendum debates, Party Political speeches, the Autumn Statement and other important policy announcements.
- A Facebook survey in 2011-14 of 12,000 supporters of anti-establishment parties in 12 European countries, published as The New Face of Digital Populism. This raw data will shortly be open sourced for other researchers to use.
- An interactive data dashboard tracking public attitudes on Twitter towards the Rochester and Strood By-Election.
- Like, Share, Vote: a report examining the potential for third sector organisations to increase voter turnout and a step-by-step guide on how to do it.
The team consists of a core staff of five, responsible for the delivery of most products. The team is highly experienced and widely published in social media research techniques and policy-making. The Centre also collaborates with a wider network of experts and organisations that advise on various aspects of the work, and provide additional research support where necessary.
Core staff
Jamie Bartlett is Director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media.
Jamie is also the Head of the Violence and Extremism Programme at Demos. An expert on research methodology, Jamie is the author of more than 20 Demos pamphlets. He advises a number of international government agencies and related groups in relation to terrorism and extremism, and is a frequent commentator in national and international media. Contact Jamie to find out more about the Centre.
Carl Miller is Research Director of the Centre.
He specialises in the use of social media research to learn about people, ideas, groups and society. He is the co-author of the Demos publications #Intelligence (2012), Truth, Lies and the Internet (2011), The Power of Unreason (2010), and papers for academic journals, the European Commission and the United Nations.
Dr Jeremy Reffin is co-founder of the Text Analytics Group at the University of Sussex.
Jeremy is Research Fellow at the University of Sussex, with a background in computer programming, venture capital, and private equity investment.
Professor David Weir is co-founder of the Text Analytics Group at the University of Sussex.
David is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Sussex. His research activities cover a broad range of topics relating to the automatic analysis of text by computers, including distributional semantics, linguistic parsing and sentiment analysis.
Simon Wibberley is an Associate.
Simon Wibberley is a Researcher at the Text Analytics Group. Simon's research interests are in statistical text analytics and he specialises in real-time text stream analysis, event detection, and entity recognition. Current projects include developing state of the art event detection and event characterisation techniques for use on Twitter.
Andrew Robertson is a researcher in the Text Analytics Group.
Andrew Robertson is a researcher in the Text Analytics Group. His research interests lie in extracting and utilising deeper structure from text sources such as Twitter, specialising in dependency parsing, entity linking and relation extraction. Current projects include adapting dependency parsing to deal with the noisy text of tweets, and developing techniques for utilising such structural information in complex sentiment analysis.
Ali Fisher is Resident Data Scientist at Demos.
Ali is Resident Data Scientist at Demos. His primary research interest is the influences on human behaviour in complex information ecosystems using network analysis and big data. Ali built the J-Trends Tracker: The cloud-based system that provides insight on the spread of extremist digital content. He works with Government Departments and helps international foundations to identify, reach and support influential activists working in closed societies. Ali also works with corporate clients as Head of data science for Stormcast: data driven intelligence from Fourtold.
Network of experts
Angus Bankes founded and was CTO of Moreover Technologies, a business intelligence and news aggregation service, and pioneer of XML and RSS feeds. Angus currently heads up the incubator JustAddRed and is Chief Information Officer at Skimlinks.
Vicky Beeching is a Theologian and Ethicist specialising in the ethics of social media, and the intersection between technology and religion. She holds degrees from Oxford and is a Visiting Research Fellow in Internet Ethics at Durham University.
Professor Stuart Croft is Pro Vice Chancellor for Research (Arts and Social Sciences) at The University of Warwick. He is also President of the British International Studies Association.
Dr Jeremy Crump is a director for safety and security at Cisco Systems and a visiting senior research fellow at the Leeds University Business School. Jeremy was previously a senior civil servant in the Cabinet Office and the Home Office and director of strategy for the National Policing Improvement Agency.
Charlie Edwards is Director of National Security and Resilience Studies at the Royal United Services Institute. Prior to RUSI he was a Research Leader at the RAND Corporation focusing on Defence and Security and was previously a former Deputy Director for Strategy and Planning in the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism at the Home Office.
Jennifer Evans is Associate Professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She currently heads up a Social Science Humanities Research Council of Canada collaborative research project entitled 'Hate 2.0: Combating the Far Right in the Age of Social Technology'.
Catherine Fieschi is the director of Counterpoint, a research and advisory group that focuses on the cultural dynamics of risk. She holds a PhD in Comparative Political Science from McGill University, is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Government at the LSE and is the author of In the Shadow of Democracy (MUP) and of numerous publications on extremism, populism and identity politics.
Christian Gladwell is Director of Human Digital, the social media analysis company, and an expert in the use of social media for policy making.
Professor Chris Hankin is a Professor of Computing Science at Imperial College London and is Director of the Institute for Security Science. He is an advisor to the EU Director General for Information, Society and Media and President of the Scientific Council of INRIA.
Professor Noreena Hertz is an economist, best-selling author and campaigner. She is currently working on a forthcoming book about decision making in a complex world. She is chair of Vox Quorum, a social media analysis company.
Sebastian Kraus is vice-chairman of Asylos, an international network providing case-tailored research for lawyers representing asylum-seekers. He oversees the network's social media research.
Peter Kreko is Director of Political Capital, a policy research and consulting institute in Hungary, and assistant professor at Eötvös Loránd University. He is co-chair of the Preventing Violent Extremism working group of the EU Radicalisation Awareness Network.
Leo Mirani covers technology for Quartz, a global business-news online publication. Prior to joining Quartz, he worked at The Economist. His areas of interest include data protection, privacy and security, digital money, and policy as well as changing business models.
Alberto Nardelli is the Co-founder and CEO of Tweetminster, a media utility that helps people and organisations discover the most relevant content, trends and insight around any topic, industry or market.
Professor Sir David Omand GCB is a visiting professor at King's College London. He is a former UK Security and Intelligence Coordinator, Permanent Secretary of the Home Office and Director of GCHQ.
Fran O’Leary is a founder and Director of Lodestone Communications, a strategy and corporate communications consultancy.
Martin Orton is Founding Director of Bold Creative and of The Digital Disruption Project, and an expert in the benefits of digital innovation for social change.
Sam Lincoln is a former senior UK military intelligence officer and Chief Surveillance Inspector with the Office of Surveillance Commissioners.
Alfred Rolington is the CEO of Oxford Analytica and the former CEO of Jane’s Information Group and Chief Executive of Lloyds of London Press Business Publishing.
Philip Sheldrake is Managing Partner of Euler Partners, a social business consultancy. He is also the author of "The Business of Influence: Reframing Marketing and PR for the Digital Age", a main board director of Intellect, and special advisor to AMEC on the measurement of social media. He leads the measurement and evaluation group at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.
Milo Yiannopoulis is founder and Editor-in Chief of The Kernel. He was previously Consulting Editor (Technology) for Telegraph.co.uk and a European contributing editor at TechCrunch. In 2011 and again in 2012, Milo was named one of the 100 most influential people in Britain’s digital economy by WIRED magazine.
Contact
If you would like to know more about the Centre, or explore options for working together, please contact Jamie Bartlett: