Introduction to the Special Issue — Social Media and Inquiry into Political Change

The idea for this special issue came to me before the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Taiwan Political Science Association, in which I joined scholars across the globe in a discussion concerning their use of social media data. In the same year, I hosted a year-long workshop series on “thick data” versus “big data,” which allowed me to brainstorm alongside 20 or so Taiwanese social science scholars from a variety of disciplines as we deliberated over the epistemology behind and the value of exploratory and confirmatory research traditions. These two courses of life experience have brought me to the position of Guest Editor and given me the opportunity to present studies that reflect this debate. The three papers presented in this special issue by no means represent the entire spectrum of social media research, but they do present a picture of how authors from different perspectives perceive and make the best use of social media-related data. Before I address the two, it is worth providing a brief overview of what I witnessed during my year of interaction with these several dozen scholars that has led to this special issue.