8/6/2019 Analysing Twitter

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Analysing Twitter

05/24/2010 8:42 pm

I have recently been attempting a discourse analysis of a Twitterchat event, The analysis

process proved harder than I was expecting. Partly, this was due to the volume of tweetswhere in a 90 minute event, 922 tweets were made, or 10.2 per minute. No wonder

participants often mentioned how hard it was to keep up with the discussions.

Given a structure that is messy, difficult and hard to analyse, the Twitter event appears toexaggerate many of the key problematic features of unstructured discussions identified by

Belnap & Withers (2008, p8). These include: sequences extending over many exchanges;

overlapping exchanges and sequences; short sequences tending to be cut off prior to a

conclusion and sequences re-emerging later in discussions. This suggests that the lack of

event coherence and stability should be more problematic, but participants seem to use

certain strategies including making lots and lots of retweets to keep sequences going or to

restart them as well as making series of statements to the Twitter event in the hope that one

of these statements will get a response. Direct and traceable exchanges tended to be reallyshort but took place within patterns of longer and often fragmented, sequences as participants

attempt to negotiate between exchange, sequence and transcript timeframes.

Many of the features of an online discursive and learning community appear to be present in

the event. These include aspects of mutual support for information-seeking activities and the

exploration of differences. Discourses in the event can seek to reinforce common

understandings and thematic coherence between the participants. There is also strong

discursive patterns that appear to seek to differentiate participants from others outwith the

specific community (Bragd et al 2008). Interestingly, as a group of professionals often with

managerial positions, the others identified and vilified were managers or the business

or them.

Also of note was that there was some evidence of intertextual and retrospective sense-making

activities. These were more usually in the form of blog posts but could be as other artefacts

including diagrams and mind maps.

The study was undertaken as a sort of proof of concept and it did show that these sorts of

Twitter discussion events provide as rich a vein of data as face-to-face interactions or other

(dare I say) more traditional forms of computer mediated communication. In other words, itworked and Twitter conversations are meaningful.

References

Belnap, J. K., & Withers, M. G. (2008). Discourse Analysis : The problematic analysis of

unstructured / unfacilitated group discussions. Conference on Research inUndergraduate Mathematics Education, Feb.

Bragd, A., Christensen, D., Czarniawska, B. & Tullberg, M. (2008) Discourse as the means

of community creation. Scandinavian Journal of Management. 24(3):199-208..