\n<\/p>\n
For many of us in anthropology, the advent of \u201cbig data” represents a threat.\u00a0 Why, after all, spend months developing rapport and interviewing 100 people when you can run sentiment analyses on 40 million tweets in a matter of hours?\u00a0 Still, I agree with Tricia Wang<\/a>, who urges us to engage big data and complement that work with our own \u201cthick data.\u201d\u00a0 In \u201cthick data,\u201d the depths of our insights into meaning and interpretation, \u201cthe native\u2019s point of view,\u201d could act as a corrective to billions of data points that may \u201cspeak for themselves,\u201d as Chris Anderson claimed, but not, perhaps, for people.\u00a0 Ironically, this move to \u201cthick data” was enabled by the gradual choking off of data access to social media APIs.\u00a0 Facebook, Instagram, Twitter – one by one social media platforms began limiting third-party access to their data, under the cover of protecting users from infringements on their privacy.\u00a0 Well, not all third-party access.\u00a0 Corporations and select researchers still manage to maintain access to the \u201cfirehose\u201d of user data in social media, while the rest of us have to make do with whatever limited sets of data we can access.\u00a0 For some platforms, (e.g., Facebook), access has ceased altogether.\u00a0 You can still gain access to much of this proprietary data through scraping, but that\u2019s not an ethical research practice for anthropology.\u00a0 So, I\u2019ve worked towards my \u201cthick data,\u201d using the limited data I can download from platforms like Twitter to broaden the \u201cdeep\u201d data I\u2019ve been getting from more traditional, ethnographic methods.\u00a0<\/p>\n This has proven useful for community-based ethnographic work, and I’ve applied it to studies of neighborhoods in Baltimore, in Seoul, and elsewhere, resulting in articles and a co-authored monograph (\u201cNetworked Anthropology<\/a>\u201d) explaining the advantages of this mixed-methods approach to community-based, participatory research strategies.\u00a0 I\u2019ve also worked on multiple grants with the National Park Service using the same approach.\u00a0 \u00a0There, the park itself is the focus of social media investigation, with the ultimate goal being the identification of community stakeholders and their connections to the park.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n