This is a real shame. link to ‘Twitter just closed the book on academic research - The Verge’

This is… I don’t know what this is. Besides a whole bunch of nonsense. link to ‘Twitter Demands Academics Who Won’t Pay $42k/Month Delete Any Twitter Data They Currently Have | Techdirt’

This article has been available online for nearly two years, but since I don’t have any previous posts about it, I’m happy to announce that a study of mine with Dan Krutka has just been assigned to an issue at the Journal of Research on Technology in Education. A number of years ago, Twitter released some large datasets of tweets associated with accounts created as part of various governments’ information operation efforts.

RIP my Twitter research. Glad I have other irons in the fire… link to ‘Twitter’s $42,000-per-Month API Prices Out Nearly Everyone | WIRED’

Some good coverage of the consequences of API restrictions for researchers—though I think we still need clarification from Twitter about whether the academic dev status is being handled separately from primary dev status. link to ‘Twitter’s new data access rules will make research harder : NPR’

I presume this decisuon also cuts off academics; this is going to have a huge impact on research, and not in a good way. I’m glad I’ve pivoted to other platforms, but this is still infuriating. link to ‘Twitter to remove free API access in latest money making quest - The Verge’

For over three years now, I’ve been getting increasingly involved with research projects that involve the online far right in one way or another. One of the most interesting ways that I’ve developed as a researcher during this time is having to think through in greater detail my commitments to research ethics. Because my research typically focuses on public social media data, I am rarely required to obtain informed consent from those whom I study.

I hadn’t realized so many academics were working with data brokers. It’s kind of scary! The EFF has some good points here about so-called “data for good”—and rightly brings up that ethics review boards should be thinking about this sort of thing. link to ‘Bad Data “For Good”: How Data Brokers Try to Hide in Academic Research | Electronic Frontier Foundation’

I got word that a recent publication of mine was now published in an issue of Learning, Media, and Technology. It has actually been available online first for the past ten months, but since I haven’t been good about blogging about recent publications, I figured this was as good a chance as any to write a post about it. This piece is called “Lifting the Veil on TeachersPayTeachers.com: An Investigation of Educational Marketplace Offerings and Downloads” and is a collaboration with Catharyn Shelton, Matt Koehler, and Jeff Carpenter.

What is the most soothing form of digital data collection, and why is it forum scraping?

Just because you can topic model something doesn’t mean it actually tells us anything (and please don’t ever describe computational text analysis as “objective”).

One of those afternoons where I’m auditing someone’s analysis code, but it’s an analysis of 4M rows of data, so I’m also doing spurts of grading while I wait for code to execute.

35 GB of data is a lot to begin with, but when it’s 35 GB of CSVs? That’s when it starts to really register.

I got a reminder today that I do the kind of research where something as hilariously unintuitive as telling a program to treat long numbers as “words made up of 0-9” is actually a critical step to making sure you get the right results.