Since the early days of social media, there has been a lot of excitement about how data traces left behind by users can be exploited for the study of human behavior. Nowadays, researchers who were once restricted to surveys or experiments in laboratory settings have access to huge amounts of “real-world” data from social media. The research opportunities enabled by social media data are undeniable. However, researchers often analyze this data with tools that were not designed to manage the kind of large, noisy observational sets of data you find on social media. We explored problems that researchers might encounter due…
This story continues at The Next Web