The Innovative Research Methodologies for a Digital Society 2020-2021 workshop series introduced and explored new and pioneering ways of collecting, processing and investigating digital data, paying particular attention to the interplay of ongoing changes and challenges in our digital world.

Researchers presented their methods and methodologies, along with insights into the background of why they used these methods, their experience of setting them up and adapting them for their studies, as well as the limitations and ethical considerations that they had to take into account.

See below for a full list of workshops held in the 2020-21 series:

  • Dec 2020. The insights and limitations of analysing Twitter networks in mixed methods research by Emma Seddon, School of Education: in this workshop, Emma demonstrated the advantages of a mixed methods approach, integrating the analysis of Twitter networks into ethnographic data; discussing how the quantitative measures of social network analysis can speak to qualitative data, and the richness this brings to research.
  • Jan 2021. Using Ecological Momentary Assessment to Understand Complex Processes of Social and Digital Change by Dominic Chalmers, Adam Smith Business School: Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA) is a digital research methodology designed to track granular within and between-person variations in behaviour. This workshop provided an overview of research software (EVI) developed by Dominic, designed to easily operationalise EMA studies. Given the limited application of EMA in sociology, economics and business research more generally, the forum served as an opportunity to explore how EMA might be applied to study processes of social and digital change.
  • Mar 2021. A Practical Guide to Using Data Ontologies in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences by Michael Pidd, from the Digital Humanities Institute: the aim of this workshop was to explore how data ontologies can be used to structure, organise and analyse primary and secondary sources -- including mixed data types -- in order to better represent the subject domain in question and leverage new forms of inquiry.
  • Apr 2021. Zeroing in: large language models and zero shot learning for automated text classification by Ryan Omizo, Assistant Professor of English at Temple University: for researchers studying large sources of textual data such as corpora of coronavirus-related Tweets, Reddit posts, Amazon product reviews, or fake news articles, codifying the volume and variety of available linguistic patterns can be a challenge. This workshop provided participants with hands-on experience with zero shot classification utilizing state of the art pretrained natural language inference models and publicly available datasets.
  • Jun 2021. Getting started with Social Network Analysis: Networks are everywhere! By Yasi Sarabi, Edinburgh Business School, Heriot-Watt University: this workshop provided an overview of the field of Social Network Analysis (SNA), and insights into how it can be used in scholarly practice in various disciplines, specifically in business and management. The workshop explored how you can get started with SNA with an overview of the key tools and software packages available, with some examples from business and management studies used to show the extent and applicability of SNA.
  • Nov 2021. Citation network analysis: science mapping and citation bias by Dr Rhodri I. Leng, University of Edinburgh: this workshop provided an overview of citation network analysis – an application of network analysis to bibliometric data. This is a method for representing the scientific literature on any given area of interest as an interconnected network of papers – with connections from a citing paper to the cited paper.
  • Dec 2021. Corpus-based methodology: opportunities for data extraction and linguistic material analysis by Jevgenija Selivanova, Univerity of Latvia: this workshop gave an insight into corpus-based research methodology. Corpus-based approach can be and is successfully used for language study as well as other areas of humanities. The workshop concentrated on the application of the approach for the language study, where the focus is specifically set on the opportunities corpus provides on data extraction, namely, the search for specific lexical units, terms and collocations used in authentic texts with the aim to answer the stated research questions.

First published: 23 February 2022

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