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What social media data should i use in my research?: A comparative analysis of twitter, youtube, reddit, and the new york times comments
Author(s) -
Choi Dongho,
Matni Ziad,
Shah Chirag
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
proceedings of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.193
H-Index - 14
ISSN - 2373-9231
DOI - 10.1002/pra2.2016.14505301151
Subject(s) - social media , variety (cybernetics) , diversity (politics) , data science , computer science , world wide web , data collection , sociology , social science , artificial intelligence , anthropology
The emergence of popular social media allows people to generate and share information in unprecedented and multiple ways. While studies concerning social media data are plentiful and can be found across a variety of scholarly disciplines, there has been little research done that compares multiple social media while considering topics and goals of an investigation. We collected and analyzed comparable data from four different social media sources: Twitter, YouTube, Reddit , and the New York Times website, across five research topics. We then analyzed these data sets across several criteria, such as richness and the diversity of information that they contain. Our analysis shows the trade‐offs between different social media services and also provides a new framework to compare cross‐platform data collection and analysis utility.