In January, I attended the Digital Methods Winter School and Data Sprint 2020 at the University of Amsterdam, generously supported by a training bursary from the Centre for Data Culture and Society.

The school is organised by the Digital Methods Initiative, one of Europe’s leading Internet research centres. The group designs and develops tools for repurposing online devices and platforms to facilitate research into social and political issues.

The one-week programme included keynote speakers and digital methods tutorials, followed by an intensive data sprint working in groups with other researchers. This year’s research theme for the Winter School, ‘Post-API research? On the contemporary study of social media data’, considered the future of working with social media data in light of the narrowing (in the case of Twitter) or closure (for Facebook and Instagram) of the Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that formerly provided access to data for academic research.

For my own research, which examines and contextualises the use of social media platforms and digital channels by arts organisations and festivals, changes to and closure of API access has many practical implications for collecting and analysing social media data. The opportunity to engage and experiment with alternative approaches – digital ethnography and crowdsourced data, for example – afforded by my attendance at the Winter School was both valuable and timely in helping me plan my work and upcoming data collection.

My PhD research also considers how user behaviour might influence the relevance of analytics and metrics for measuring the ‘success’ of arts organisations’ digital content. In selecting a group for the data sprint element of the week, my interest in user behaviours led me to the project ‘Who is /ourguy/? Studying political Internet subcultures through their identification with public figures’. The project examined ways in which pseudonymous and anonymous Internet subcultures, operating on websites like Reddit, Tumblr and 4chan, use public figures to create collective identities.

The opportunity to work with digital methods and tools, as well as platforms, with which I was unfamiliar has helped me develop my own work with a critical approach to the influence of user behaviour and to ask important questions about the value and context of the data I collect from social media.

- Vikki Jones, PhD researcher, Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art.

• Applications for CDCS training bursaries are open until 1 July 2020 - How to apply for a CDCS Training Bursary