Robert Ackland's new book, Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age, was launched by Professor Peter Grabosky from the ANU College of Asia and the Pacific on Tuesday 3 December.

About the book

This book provides readers with a comprehensive guide to the theory and practice of Web Social Science. It demonstrates how the Web is being used to collect social research data, such as online surveys and interviews, as well as digital trace data from social media environments, such as Facebook and Twitter. It also illuminates how the advent of the Web has led to traditional social science concepts and approaches being combined with those from other scientific disciplines, leading to new insights into social, political and economic behaviour.

Original and timely, this book will be of immense value for students and researchers throughout the social sciences as well as those from other disciplines who want to learn about how social scientists are thinking about and researching the Web.

Buy the book

Web Social Science: Concepts, Data and Tools for Social Scientists in the Digital Age is published by Sage and is available from Amazon or Footprint Books.

About the author

Associate Professor Robert Ackland is Deputy Director (Education) in the Australian Demographic & Social Research Institute, Australian National University. An economist by training, Robert has been working since 2002 in the fields of network science, computational social science and web science, with a particular focus on quantitative analysis of online social and organisational networks. Robert leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks project and teaches on the social science of the Internet, statistics, and online research methods.