One of the most exciting new sources of social data can be up-to-the-minute and as close as your smartphone: Twitter. But how do you approach deciding on a Twitter-based research project? How do you corral all the data? And what sort of methods have proven – so far! – as the best for deciphering and analyzing the flood of social media data flooding in? Lastly, wouldn’t it be great if someone, maybe even two people, who have done successful Twitter-based research could help you answer those questions?

Michael Todd, community manager of SAGE’s Methodspace website, talks with Luke Sloan, a senior lecturer in quantitative methods at Cardiff University, and Joshua Tucker of New York University’s Social Media and Political Participation (SMaPP) lab (smapp.nyu.edu) in this hour-long webinar focused on just these sorts of questions. Sloan has worked on a range of projects investigating the use of Twitter data for understanding social phenomena covering topics such as election prediction, tracking (mis)information propagation during food scares and ‘crime-sensing,’ while Tucker’s work in comparative political science in modern elections has led him to pioneering examinations of the nexus of political identity and online communication.