Understudied Networks in Computational Social Science
NetSci 2025 Satellite Symposium, Maastricht, 3 June 2025, 9:00 - 12:30
The decline of academic APIs like Crowdtangle, Reddit, and Twitter, along with doubts about the effectiveness of the EU’s Digital Services Act facilitating data access, raises concerns for the future of social media research. However, these new barriers to data access open up new avenues for studying alternative datasets that have been understudied thus far including the Fediverse, Bluesky, WhatsApp, Telegram, and the Podcast Ecosystem. Although these platforms have their own data accessibility challenges, existing datasets are often overlooked by our community. This satellite aims to promote computational social science research which explores these understudied or unusual social network datasets and help other researchers to find datasets that they were not previously aware of.
We invite contributed presentations (10 minutes) on network-based research (remember this is NetSci!) in computational social science using understudied datasets (i.e., studies NOT only using Twitter or Facebook data). The purpose of the satellite is not to teach data acquisition methods using APIs, the DSA, or scraping – others have covered this topic previously – but we ask presenters to only present data which is publicly available in some form and to comment on where their data is available. We also encourage a discussion on which problems in CSS might be studied with the datasets that are already available to our community.
Some FAQs
- Are submissions on alternative platforms in scope? Yes, they are.
- Are submissions on mainstream platforms in scope? Yes, as long as they address aspects that have not been sufficiently studied so far, such as unexplored topics, countries, or metrics.
- Should submissions include social media data? Not necessarily.
- Will you consider submissions on models for social phenomena? Yes, we will.
- Will you consider “dataset paper”-like submissions? Yes, we will.