Studying Facebook and Instagram data: The Digital Footprints software
By Anja Bechmann, Peter Bjerregaard Vahlstrup. 2015
21 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The aim of this article is to discuss methodological implications and challenges in different kinds of deep and big data studies of Facebook and Instagram through methods involving the use of Application Programming Interface (API) data. This article describes and discusses Digital Footprints ( www.digitalfootprints.dk ), a data extraction and analytics software that allows researchers to extract user data from Facebook and Instagram data sources; public streams as well as private data with user consent. Based on insights from the software design process and data driven studies the article argues for three main challenges: Data quality, data access and analysis, and legal and ethical considerations.
Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science, Transportation, Social Sciences & Humanities
How researchers see this paper
The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.
In Communication
In Sociology and Political Science
In Social Sciences & Humanities
Citations in the corpus
- What do we mean when we talk about transparency? Towards meaningful transparency in commercial content moderation (2019, background): “…program interfaces and terms of service of major platforms are designed primarily for commercial exploitation and are not suitable for research, effectively making a great deal of important research impractical or impossible for scholars (Bechmann & Vahlstrup, 2015; Burgess & Bruns, 2015).”