1. Hashtag lifelines
A digital methods summer school 2012 project
Jill, Colleen, Diego, Johannes, Sara, Albrecht,
Allesandro, Kalina, Tally, Esther, Noortje & Carolin
2. Liveliness of issue terms
Focus on hashtag mining as
technique for analysing variability of
issue terms over time.
1. Are hashtags a suitable format for analysing liveliness of issue terms?
2. Does co-word provide a useful alternative to frequency measures here?
• Rather than defining what rises and falls (Downs 1974), detect what is active
and changes in association.
• Defining and applying different measures of liveliness (frequency, co-word; per
interval, per day).
3. The Dataset
• Twitter data for “Climate Change”.
• Period: 01.02. - 15.06
• Interval: six 2 week intervals
• Total 204795 tweets.
• Focus on hashtags.
4. What we did
1. Variation of key 3. Actor profiling per
hastags over time hashtag over time
4. Associational
2. Mapping users profiles per hashtag
5. 1. Hashtags over time
• Question: What are the top hashtags per interval and how do
they vary over time based on frequency vs. co-word measures?
• Address relation between frequency & co-word measures.
METHOD: Identify top hashtags per interval (A. by
frequency and B. by co-word degree), determine
most frequent hashtags per interval for both as tube.