Paper by Brenda Moon, Nicolas Suzor & Ariadna Matamoros-Fernรกndez presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Berlin, 6 Oct. 2016.
Beyond Hashtags: Collecting and Analysing Conversations on Twitter
1. BEYOND HASHTAGS: COLLECTING AND
ANALYSING CONVERSATIONS ON TWITTER
Brenda Moon, Nicolas Suzor & Ariadna Matamoros-Fernรกndez
Digital Media Research Centre
Queensland University of Technology
2. Previous research
โข Twitter
โ Keywords/hashtags (Rambukkana, 2015; Bruns & Burgess,
2015)
โขNetwork analysis
โขContent analysis
โ Approaching completeness (Lorentzen & Nolin, 2015)
โข We want to catch more of the conversation
3. Methodology
โข Rationale
โ Computational analysis (quantitative) + Ethnography /
Visualisation / observation/ description (Qualitative)
โข What are these extra tweets telling us?
โ Where is the conversation happening? (reply-chains)
โ Can we discover new themes? (hashtags)
โ Can we discover new actors? (@mentions)
Are they relevant to the issue/controversy/event we are
examining?
4. Data collection & Uber as a case study
Seed
tweet
in_reply_to
tweet_id
in_reply_to
tweet_id
follow reply chain
back in time using
โin_reply_toโ field
which contains
the tweet_id of
the replied to
tweet
searching for
tweet_id in
โin_reply_toโ field
13. Preliminary Conclusions
โข Importance of qualitative observation and
exploration to make sense of complex conversations
on social media
โข The method is more useful to identify conversations
and understand context rather than discover new
themes via hashtags (e.g. central issues vs
annotations)
โข Visualization helps identify points of interest
14. Future outlook
โข Additional case studies to identify which types of
events reply chain supplementation is useful for.
โข Identifying โkey media objectsโ
(e.g. highly posted images, videos, or arguments)
and tracing the conversation specifically around
them, rather than our keyword datasets.
โขEvolution over time - looking at how these
conversations evolve and change over time
15. Thank you :)
Brenda Moon @brendam
Nicolas Suzor @nicsuzor
Ariadna Matamoros-Fernรกndez @andairamf
Digital Media Research Centre
Queensland University of Technology