Why Study Social Media Data Mining?

Abstract

Kennedy provides a rationale for studying social media data mining. The characteristics of social media make the data that are generated, mined and analysed within them an important object of study, she argues. These include: (1) the technical possibility for a wide range of actors to mine social media data; (2) social media platforms’ status as spaces for sharing feelings and thoughts, for building and maintaining relationships, for forming and performing identities; and (3) their penetration of many aspects of everyday life, and their shaping and reshaping people’s personal interactions and organisational operations. Kennedy then describes in detail what social media data mining is, classifying available tools into four types: in-platform, free-and-easy, commercial and free-and-complex. These categorisations are intended to guide the non-expert reader through the complex social media data mining terrain.