The Social Media Macroscope: A science gateway for research using social media data

Abstract In recent years, the explosion of social media platforms and the public collection of social data has brought forth a growing desire and need for research capabilities in the realm of social media and social data analytics. Research on this scale, however, requires a high level of computational and data-science expertise, limiting the researchers who are capable of undertaking social media data-driven research to those with significant computational expertise or those who have access to such experts as part of their research team. The Social Media Macroscope (SMM) is a science gateway with the goal of removing that limitation and making social media data, analytics, and visualization tools accessible to researchers and students of all levels of expertise. The SMM provides a single point of access to a suite of intuitive web interfaces for performing social media data collection, analysis, and visualization via for open-source and commercial tools. Within the SMM social scientists are able to process and store large datasets and collaborate with other researchers by sharing ideas, data, and methods. This document functions as a brief primer on the initial build of the SMM and we end this paper discussing future directions for the SMM.