Dear AIR List Members - The 2013 iConference in Dallas, TX features a number of excellent workshops, including our workshop on "Big Social Data". The workshop is particularly aimed at social scientists who do not have the technical experience to mine data reliably from social media, or experience organizing and analyzing it in the service of social science (Internet) research. You will learn how, working with data you are interested in, in a hands on manner at our workshop. Date: February 12, 2013 (in the context of a conference that runs from February 12 ­ 15, 2013). Location: Dallas-ish (Fort Worth), TX If interested, email: iconferencebigdata@gmail.com For more information on our workshop, click here: http://groupinformatics.org/bigsocialdata and here: http://www.groupinformatics.org/bigsocialdata2013detail To learn about other aspects of the iConference, check out the conference website here: http://www.ischools.org/iConference13/2013index/ For those of you not afflicted by TLDR, here's an inline and brief description of the workshop: Our proposed workshop is focused on helping to build Big Social Data collection, management, analysis and visualization research competencies in the iSchool Community. Over the past six years our team has developed an end-to-end data collection, management, storage and visualization system. We aim to share our strategies, methodological approaches, tools and experiences in a hands on workshop focused on data that participants are interested in. We propose three paths to participation in order to assist a wide range of scholars in the development of their own approaches to Big Social Data, and to initiate the development of a discourse community within the iSchool caucus. First, participants who are curious about Big Social Data, but do not yet have well formed research questions, will be provided with public data sets we have collected from Twitter to demonstrate how big data can be used to answer a diverse set of research questions. Second, participants may submit research questions and a set of corresponding search terms in advance of the workshop. For these participants, we will use our existing Twitter data collection infrastructure, called TwitterZombie, to collect public data on their behalf under our existing IRB at Drexel University. Third, participants may choose to submit their own data. Thanks! Sean P. Goggins, Ph.D http://www.groupinformatics.org <http://www.groupinformatics.org/> Phone: (215) 948-2729 "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." -- Margaret Mead "The most effective way to do it, is to do it." -- Amelia Earhart visit - http://www.sociotech.net <http://www.sociotech.net/> personal website ­ http://www.seangoggins.net <http://www.facebook.com/sean.p.goggins>