Researching (with) Reddit

Date: May 23rd

Time: 10:00-15:00

Location: R1.04

With its tagline, 'the frontpage of the internet', Reddit is one of the most popular websites for news aggregation, discussion forums and content ranking on the web. Millions of users contribute everyday to thousands of topics and areas of interest on the site, generating excesses of comments and recirculating memes, while also raising issues around moderation and governance. With its relatively open infrastructure, moreover, Reddit allows for forms of empirical inquiry that are distinct from those afforded by closed corporate platforms like Twitter and Facebook. What methods can be used for researching Reddit? What kinds of research questions can be applied to this domain?

At this one day workshop organised by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies (CIM), we'll experiment with digital methods for researching Reddit. This is an open session with a flexible format; it is not instructional per se, but more exploratory in nature.

We'll be using a range of tools and datasets focussing on the prominence and spread of key terms and topics, along with transformations in discourse over time within and across subreddits. Our specific interest will be on software development forums, specifically for apps, but we are keen for participants to apply these approaches to any other domains of interest such as, for instance, political subcultures, memes, fandom, cryptocurrencies, or whatever!

 

All welcome! To confirm attendance, email Michael Dieter: m.j.dieter@warwick.ac.uk