e-Research applications for tracking online socio-political capital in the Asia-Pacific region

Online content offers with it the potential to provide a rich source of data for academic researchers. To capture this data an e-Research tool was developed to utilise results from prominent Korean search engine Naver in the analysis of online political presence, thereby bridging a lack of coverage for this approach in the Asia-Pacific region. This paper will outline the development of this specific tool as well as highlight e-Research tool development in general. Whilst e-Research tools offer greater access to large datasets from online sources than more established data collection methods, they also present challenges to implementation and a lack of consensus exists on the responsibilities when collecting and handling public data. The practice of online data collection and how this can inform an analysis of social capital will be discussed, as well as addressing some of the challenges involved in the development and analysis stages. Suggestions for researchers from a social science background planning to embark on e-Research tool development in an Asian context are offered.

[1]  K. Youm.  Copyright Law in the Republic of Korea , 1999 .

[2]  Peter Stoehr,et al.  Harvesting needed to maintain scientific literature online , 2008, JCDL '08.

[3]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Blog search engines , 2007, Online Inf. Rev..

[4]  P. Adler,et al.  Social Capital: Prospects for a New Concept , 2002 .

[5]  Amanda Spink,et al.  Searching the Web: the public and their queries , 2001 .

[6]  Michael L. Nelson,et al.  Agreeing to disagree: search engines and their public interfaces , 2007, JCDL '07.

[7]  M. Castells.  Communication Power: Mass Communication, Mass Self-Communication and Power Relationships in the Network Society , 2009, Media and Society.

[8]  James E. Porter,et al.  The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process , 2009 .

[9]  Steven Sams,et al.  Networked Politics on Cyworld: The Text and Sentiment of Korean Political Profiles , 2011 .

[10]  Elizabeth H. Bassett,et al.  Ethics of Internet research: Contesting the human subjects research model , 2002, Ethics and Information Technology.

[11]  David R. Karger,et al.  Piggy Bank: Experience the Semantic Web inside your web browser , 2005, J. Web Semant..

[12]  Adam Jatowt,et al.  Honto? Search: Estimating Trustworthiness of Web Information by Search Results Aggregation and Temporal Analysis , 2007, APWeb/WAIM.

[13]  Benyuan Liu,et al.  Vision: towards real time epidemic vigilance through online social networks: introducing SNEFT -- social network enabled flu trends , 2010, MCS '10.

[14]  Eyhab Al-Masri,et al.  Investigating web services on the world wide web , 2008, WWW.

[15]  P. Hare.  Advance Online Publication , 2002, Nature Medicine.

[16]  Anne E. Trefethen,et al.  The Data Deluge: An e-Science Perspective , 2003 .

[17]  E. Michael Maximilien,et al.  A Domain-Specific Language for Web APIs and Services Mashups , 2007, ICSOC.

[18]  Robert E. Kraut,et al.  Social capital on facebook: differentiating uses and users , 2011, CHI.

[19]  Scott Counts,et al.  Thin Slices of Online Profile Attributes , 2021, ICWSM.

[20]  Young Sik Kim,et al.  Study on Collective Memory in the Blogosphere , 2009, 2009 International Conference on Computational Science and Engineering.

[21]  Georgia Koutrika,et al.  Can social bookmarking improve web search? , 2008, WSDM '08.

[22]  Daniel J. Brass,et al.  Network Analysis in the Social Sciences , 2009, Science.

[23]  N. Jankowski.  E-Research: Transformation in Scholarly Practice , 2009 .

[24]  M. Nentwich.  Cyberscience: Research in the Age of the Internet , 2003 .

[25]  Patricia E. Tweet.  Brokerage and Closure: An Introduction to Social Capital , 2006 .

[26]  Isabell M. Welpe,et al.  Election Forecasts With Twitter , 2011 .

[27]  M. Thelwall,et al.  Researching Personal Information on the Public Web , 2011 .

[28]  John Yates,et al.  Scrapping over data: are the data scrapers' days numbered? , 2009 .

[29]  Nick Lee,et al.  The primacy of data , 2008 .

[30]  Marcel-Catalin Rosu,et al.  A Survey of Public Web Services , 2004, EC-Web.

[31]  Murat Ali Bayir,et al.  Crowd-sourced sensing and collaboration using twitter , 2010, 2010 IEEE International Symposium on "A World of Wireless, Mobile and Multimedia Networks" (WoWMoM).

[32]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Extracting accurate and complete results from search engines: Case study windows live , 2008, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[33]  Guy Fitzgerald,et al.  Do social networking groups support online petitions , 2011 .

[34]  Anja Feldmann,et al.  Understanding online social network usage from a network perspective , 2009, IMC '09.

[35]  Sanggil Kang,et al.  Another Face of Search Engine: Web Search API's , 2008, IEA/AIE.

[36]  Mike Thelwall,et al.  Web crawling ethics revisited: Cost, privacy, and denial of service , 2006, J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol..

[37]  Marcel-Catalin Rosu,et al.  A survey of public web services , 2004, WWW Alt. '04.