Arguments and interpretation in big social data analysis: A survey of the ASONAM community

摘要

Big social data is becoming an important part of human decision making around the world. With the high stakes of decisions based on technical systems, it is important to evaluate the role of researchers in shaping that shared future. I present the results of a survey of 2015 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining participants who performed big social data analyses. The goal was to understand how data scientists use interpretation to complete their projects and how they communicate results to their audience. By looking at research design as both a technical roadmap and an argument, results generated from social media data sets can be evaluated for their quality. Ultimately, these results will assist in the creation of field-dependent evaluation standards than can be used by big social data researchers.