In the few years since the advent of 'Big Data' research, social media analytics has begun to accumulate studies drawing on social media as a resource and tool for research work. Yet, there has been relatively little attention paid to the development of methodologies for handling this kind of data. The few works that exist in this area often reflect upon the implications of 'grand' social science methodological concepts for new social media research (i.e. they focus on general issues such as sampling, data validity, ethics, etc.). By contrast, we advance an abductively oriented methodological suite designed to explore the construction of phenomena played out through social media. To do this, we use a software tool-Chorus-to illustrate a visual analytic approach to data. Informed by visual analytic principles, we posit a two-by-two methodological model of social media analytics, combining two data collection strategies with two analytic modes. We go on to demonstrate each of these four approaches 'in action', to help clarify how and why they might be used to address various research questions.

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In this article we demonstrate the use of an integrative approach to visualizing and tracking the development of scientific paradigms. This approach is designed to reveal the long-term process of competing scientific paradigms. We assume that a cluster of highly cited and cocited scientific publications in a cocitation network represents the core of a predominant scientific paradigm. The growth of a paradigm is depicted and animated through the rise of citation rates and the movement of its core cluster towards the center of the cocitation network. We study two cases of competing scientific paradigms in the real world: (1) the causes of mass extinctions, and (2) the connections between mad cow disease and a new variant of a brain disease in humans-vCJD. Various theoretical and practical issues concerning this approach are discussed.

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Detecting psychological change through mobilizing interactions and changes in extremist linguistic style,