Things that didn’t work out in social media research – and what we can learn from them

PAST WORKSHOPS:

#FAIL! at ICWSM, Cologne, Germany, May 17, 2016.

#FAIL! at IR16, Phoenix, Arizona, October 21, 2015.

#FAIL! at WebSci15, Oxford, June 29, 2015.

SUMMARY

This is the official Website for a new workshop series entitled “#FAIL! Things that didn’t work out in social media research – and what we can learn from them”. Our aim for the series is to collect cases in which approaches for social media studies did not work out as expected. This will deepen and refine our understanding of how to use properly social media methods, help saving time and effort by preventing researchers from making again the same “mistakes”. We also want to help researchers to make public “unsuccessful” but labor-intensive work that may not easily be published in classical formats, so that they can get credit for this and help others at the same time.

The workshop series has two main objectives. It will

  • … provide a platform for expert knowledge, which is currently inaccessible to the wider public – by focusing und the pitfalls and drawbacks of social media research which can hardly be published in traditional journal formats.
  • … enable discussions on methods in social media research on an interdisciplinary scale, by applying a new workshop format inspired by the “world cafe” approach.

CONNECTING DIFFERENT CONFERENCES

In addition to trying to bring together researchers from several disciplines in one conference, we want to connect researchers across different conference series. The workshop organizers bring together new groups of people at different conferences, while carrying with them the experiences collected in previous events. Over the course of time, the experiences from different communities will be collected by the organizers/hosts and shared with the different communities.

Proposals for #FAIL! workshops will therefore be submitted to as many as possible conferences which gather social media researchers. The first #FAIL! workshop (#fail2015a) has been held at the Web Science Conference 2015 (#WebSci15), June 2015, in Oxford, UK. The second workshop (#fail2015b) has taken place at the Internet Research IR16 conference which in Phoenix, Arizona, October 2015. And the third workshop has been helt at ICWSM 2016 in Cologne, Germany, Mai 17th, 2016.

Please see individual information for each workshop. Additional suggestions for suitable conferences are very welcome!

OUTCOME

The final aim is to combine the cases presented across the different conferences into an edited collection. In the meantime, we will explore ways to make available the workshop presentations and papers via this website or other channels.