Tools and methods in crowdsourcing and Internet-based experimenting

Add to Calendar
Event Type: 
Brown Bag
Date and Time: 
Thursday, December 10, 2015
12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Speaker: 
Ulf-Dietrich Reips
University of Konstanz
Abstract: 

In this presentation I will give an intro to methods and tools for Internet-based experimenting and behavioral and social science research with social media. I will provide an overview of and guidelines and techniques, methods, and tools for Internet-based experimenting and research with Social Media that provide solutions to many of the methodological challenges in data collection via the Internet. The challenges discussed include issues in design,security, recruitment, sampling, selection of and access to social media platforms, multiple submissions, measurement scales, response time measurement, dropout, error estimation, data assessment, data handling, and data quality. Among other methods that have been developed in Web methodology and Internet science, I will explain the one-item-one-screen (OIOS) design, the seriousness check, sub-sampling procedures, and the multiple site entry technique. In addition to example research based on several types of social media (e.g. Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Google search) I will present some tools we have developed. Among other tools available from our iScience Server at http://iscience.eu I will demonstrate our Web experiment generator WEXTOR (http://wextor.org) as a tool that automatically implements optimal solutions and iScience Maps, a free Web service for researchers, available from http://tweetminer.eu/ that can be used to analyze tweets. Tweeting (sending messages via Twitter) and other microblogging has gained prominence as a way to broadcast personal messages. Location awareness and promptness provide researchers using the Internet with the opportunity to create "psychological landscapes" and timelines from the microblogged messages - that is, to detect differences and changes in voiced (twittered) emotions, cognitions, and behaviors. Another example is Social Lab, our "Open Source Facebook" available at http://sociallab.es that can be played with in learning about privacy at http://en.sociallab.es. The presentation will conclude with evolving and future scenarios of using social media in scientific work. Publications are available from http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Ulf-Dietrich_Reips and http://tinyurl.com/reipspub .