Towards Building a Social Computing Tool for Social Scientists

This paper presents a social computing tool that centers around social scientists. In the past years, we have worked with social scientists and cultural anthropologists. We learned their ways of studying subjects in social media, what their needs are, and their interests. In the process, we have built a generic platform for collecting data in the blogosphere, tracking blogs of particular interests, and facilitating comparative data analysis. We report our progress in building and expanding this social-scientist-centered social computing tool. We show how we are inspired by the research of social scientists in our effort to build the platform - BlogTrackers, which can help identify key topics of discussion, identify influential bloggers, track topics over time, and search blogs. These features can help social scientists to quickly analyze both blogs and bloggers at a scale, which is otherwise impossible through manual investigation.