Bridging disciplinary divide: a workshop on methods

I would be interested in developing a workshop that could foster better interdisciplinary approaches and sharing of methods for the research of digital citizens/online communities.

In my research projects I do a combination of qualitative driven corpus studies, experiments and some machine learning work. I'm currently looking at how people discuss patient care on Twitter and what I am finding strongly challenges the ideas currently circulated by monitoring bodies that want to save money by replacing time-intensive qualitative approaches (such as interviews, focus groups, on site visits) with automated processes drawing on publicly available 'big data' from social media. For example, I think the importance of the performative function of tweets and also the wider socio-political discourse that many tweets engage with needs to be considered more. In order for meaningful insights to be extracted from large datasets relating to human interaction in digital communities there needs to be closer relations between qualitative and quantitative research communities. Although such collaborations can be extremely fruitful and beneficial, it can sometimes be challenging to integrate diverse approaches.

I imagine this workshop could bring together researchers with different skill sets to address challenges associated with cross-disciplinary research partnerships, share
methodologies and working practices and find potential collaborations.

If anyone's research intersects with these issues I would love to hear your thoughts.