DISCIPLINES
Computational approaches to social media research including
Natural language processing
Text / data mining
Machine learning
Image / multimedia processing
Graphics and visualization
Distributed computing
Graph theory and Network Science
Human-computer interaction
Social science approaches to social media research including
Psychology
Sociology and social network analysis
Communication
Political science
Economics
Anthropology
Media studies and journalism
Digital Humanities
Interdisciplinary approaches to social media research combining computational algorithms and social science methodologies
TOPICS INCLUDE (BUT ARE NOT LIMITED TO)
Studies of digital humanities (culture, history, arts) using social media
Psychological, personality-based and ethnographic studies of social media
Analysis of the relationship between social media and mainstream media
Qualitative and quantitative studies of social media
Centrality/influence of social media publications and authors
Ranking/relevance of social media content and users
Credibility of online content
Social network analysis; communities identification; expertise and authority discovery
Trust; reputation; recommendation systems
Human computer interaction; social media tools; navigation and visualization
Subjectivity in textual data; sentiment analysis; polarity/opinion identification and extraction, linguistic analyses of social media behavior
Text categorization; topic recognition; demographic/gender/age identification
Trend identification and tracking; time series forecasting
Measuring predictability of real world phenomena based on social media, e.g., spanning politics, finance, and health
New social media applications; interfaces; interaction techniques
Engagement, motivations, incentives, and gamification.
Social innovation and effecting change through social media
Social media usage on mobile devices; location, human mobility, and behavior
Organizational and group behavior mediated by social media; interpersonal communication mediated by social media
TYPES OF SOCIAL MEDIA INCLUDE
Social networking sites (e.g., Facebook, LinkedIn)
Microblogs (e.g., Twitter, Tumblr)
Wiki-based knowledge sharing sites (e.g., Wikipedia)
Social news sites and websites of news media (e.g., Huffington Post)
Forums, mailing lists, newsgroups
Community media sites (e.g., YouTube, Flickr, Instagram)
Social Q & A sites (e.g., Quora, Yahoo Answers)
User reviews (e.g., Yelp, Amazon.com)
Social curation sites (e.g., Reddit, Pinterest)
Location-based social networks (e.g., Foursquare)
Messaging platforms (e.g., Snapchat, Messenger, WhatsApp)