My fieldwork affair with the Neo-Smart Pen
November 24, 2017
My research projects are typically ethnographies at settings where carrying along laptops, tablets, cameras and other relatively heavy or expensive devices for data collection is not always feasible, safe or practical. I have used alternatives such as mobile phones as many now incorporate large storage spaces, high-end hardware and apps for taking pictures, recording and …
“What is a qualitative researcher to do…” – Digitising a Newspaper Archive
August 24, 2017
Dr Christian Karner, Associate Professor, Faculty of Social Sciences talks about the role of his newspaper archive in his research and the positive impact of digitising it: “What is a qualitative researcher to do when faced with an already enormous and continuously growing corpus of data? Guided by their self-definition as social scientists in search of particularistic …
Fake News, Digital Sociology and Computerphile
August 2, 2017
The Digital Research Team have been working with Dr Christian Karner from the School of Sociology and Social Policy to enhance his research through use of different digital technologies. This led to a research project in collaboration with Dr Martin Flintham from the School Computer Science looking at Fake News. Christian recently filmed an interview …
Fake News Research Study Outcomes and Reflection
August 1, 2017
The Digital Research Team have helped facilitate a collaboration between researchers in Computer Science and Sociology. This is a guest blog post written by Dr Helen Creswick. The research team created a fake Facebook profile, populating it with various news posts (fake and otherwise), and recruited participants to take part in an activity where they …
Use of Affordable Eye Tracking in News Verification Strategies
June 14, 2017
The Digital Research team are facilitating a collaboration between Schools of Sociology and Social Policy, and Computer Science to explore fake news in social media. Having completed a survey which explored user perceptions of fake news, we are now about to begin a series of studies looking more closely at the ways people assess digital …
Emerging Research Opportunities from Digitised Newspaper Data
April 7, 2017
The Digital Research team are facilitating the digitisation of some paper-based research data in the form of a newspaper article archive. We have hired an administrative assistant who has made a great start at scanning in the thousands of articles that were collated across the last decade. Roughly speaking it is taking about 1 hour to …
Surveying Traditional and Digital Consumption of Fake News
The Digital Research Team are facilitating a collaboration between the Schools of Sociology and Social Policy, and Computer Science. The team, led by Christian Karner and Martin Flintham, are looking to apply sociological research methods to explore fake news in social media. Following a detailed literature review, the team are moving forward with the first stage of …
Xerox Printers as a Research Tool
March 31, 2017
The Digital Research Team are currently supporting researchers in the digitisation of paper-based research data. Dr Christian Karner in the School of Sociology and Social Policy has gathered around 5000 newspaper clippings over the last 10-15 years as a part of his research. While he knows the data very well, it can be slow to …
Classifying and verifying fake news in social media
March 27, 2017
Helen Creswick, Christian Karner and Martin Flintham are currently working on an interdisciplinary research project looking at fake news in social media. A literature review is currently underway and two key taxonomy’s have emerged around types of fake news and categories of verification. Rubin et al (2017) argue that there are three types of ‘fake’ …
Digital Sociology: Digital Research Case Study 3 2017
The School of Sociology and Social Policy is home to many researchers who could benefit from the use of digital technologies, but miss out on these opportunities due to a perceived lack of relevance. As a first step toward challenging this perception, the digital research team have facilitated an interdisciplinary collaboration between Christian Karner, Associate …
