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Big Social Data and the Study of Celebrity Fandom
Sedláček, Jakub ; Numerato, Dino (advisor) ; Špaček, Ondřej (referee) ; Mikuláš, Peter (referee)
This thesis provides a novel view of celebrity fandom through the lens of big social data, while at the same time exploring the opportunities and challenges of using digital traces from social media for sociological research. The first chapter provides a sociological framing of celebrity, a short, joint history of celebrity and the media, and a discussion of the revolutionary role that social media and its platforms played in celebrity culture. Finally, it attempts to bridge theories related to celebrity's role in society with research on "lifestyle politics", "polarization", "taste cultures" and "lifestyle enclaves". The second chapter serves as an introduction into big social data and digital trace data. First as a socio-technological phenomenon, then as a research tool. It covers its historical and current availability and discusses its epistemological and practical opportunities, limits and dangers. Finally, it introduces Facebook pagelikes as a valuable source of information on lifestyle politics. Chapter three is an exploration of Facebook digital traces of 90k celebrity followers. It asks whether celebrity preferences are related to differences in various aspects of life, including politics, leisure or cultural consumption. Methodologically, it covers combining data from APIs with web scraping and...
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