la sociología en twitter

7/27/2019 la sociologa en twitter

1/22

Doing Sociology with Twitter:

Digital Ethnography Week, Trento

September 19 2012

Noortje Marres

Goldsmiths, University of London

Actor profiles and issue lifelines


2/22

Doing Sociology with Twitter:

Doing Sociology with Twitter?Issues of ownership and control in live social research....

(or: challenges to methodological sovereignty)


3/22

Digitization is enabling new ways of organising social life as well as of

analysing it (Law, Ruppert and Savage, 2010)

Digitization may also reconfigure the relation between social life and its

analysis (Rogers, 2010; Kelty, 2008)

The facilitation and analysis of social life intersect in potentially new

ways in digital platforms:

How does this affect the relations between the object, methods and

concepts of sociological research? those between data, techniques

and methods?

The case for digital sociology..


4/22

The promise of digitizationfor sociology -

some explanations

- Explosion of social traces and of analytical devices

deploying this traceability of social life (Beer, 2012)

- Digital platforms materialize sociological concepts

and phenomena, such as the performance of the

self (Hogan,2010) or actor networks (Latour and

Venturini, 2012)

- Real-time research: digitization highlights the

potential of social research techniques to intervenein social life (Back and Lury, 2012).

Do these explanations consider the changing divisions of

labour in digital sociology - if so how?


5/22

Digital techniques play a key role in formatting the empirical object ofsocial research: this affects the division of labour in social research:

1) it changes the distribution of agency between data, technique,method (eg the data organise the research design)

2) to do research with digital platforms is to import categories thatare native to the medium into social research

How to render this productive for social research, derive analytic

capacities from the medium for sociological research?

The re-distribution of social research


6/22

Twitter and the re-distribution of socialresearch methods

Twitter bears some similarities with participatory traditions in social

research, such as the mass observation movement (Savage & Burrows,

2009):

non-sociologists (users) act as observers

Twitter as an analytic apparatus poses constraints:

restricted data capture, opaque sampling the tweet as unit of

analysis, the phenomenon of the trend

The challenge for sociological research:

How can Twitter as a research apparatus and analytic culture be

re-purposed for sociological analysis?
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7/22

re-purposing Twitter for socialresearch?

The rise to prominence of live research: thetracking of the currency of actors and issues

in real-time

Liveliness: Can we analyse the activity ofissues in other terms than currency?

As opposed to liveness: currency or hotness.(How to study popularity?)

Tyranny of frequency vs. the happening of issuHow to study the happening of issues?


8/22

Case study : Lifelines 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. What are the possible alternatives for frequency analysis?

Rather than defining what rises and falls (Downs 1974), we may detect what isactive and changes in association.

Co-word analysis: methodological strategy to study innovations dynamics(Callon et.al 1983), and happening content (Danowski 2009, Marres &

Weltevrede, 2012).


9/22

The Dataset

Twitter data for Climate Change.

Period: 01.02. - 15.06

Interval: six 2 week intervals

Total 204795 tweets.

Focus on hashtags, their variation &internal relations.

Project conducted during the Co-word

Machine (Goldsmiths) and the Digital

Methods Summer School (Amsterdam)

Noortje Marres, Carolin Gerlitz, Esther

Weltevrede, Erik Borra, David Moats, Sara

Kjellberg, Tally Yaacobi-Gross, Jill Hopke,

Kalina Dancheva, Diego Dacal, Alessandro

Brunetti, Johannes Pamann, Albrecht

Hofheinz, Colleen Reilly, Bernhard Rieder.


10/22

1. Hashtags over time

QUESTION: What are the top hashtags per interval and how

do they vary over time?

SELECTION: 1) Frequency measures

2) Co-word analysis


11/22

Top hashtags per day. Bursts have short durations.

Frequency helps to understandwhat is a hashtag (publicity device,

issue transformer).

Question of medium-specificity (onTwitter issues are likely to last a day)

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Overview'Top10'#tags'(without'#climate'and'#climatechange)'

#CLEANCLOUD"

#AUSPOL"

#ENVIRONMENT"

#P2"

#SAVETHEARCTIC"

#qanda"

#tcot"

#newbedon"

#green"

#globalwarming"

1. The limits of frequency


12/22

Co-word analysis

Brings Network analysis to bear on textual data.

Focus on co-occurrence of terms, hashtags,

keywords.

Detecting emergence of new terms in relation to

other terms

Methodological strategy to study happening content

(Callon et.al 1983; Danowski 2009).

An alternative to word frequency analysis?


13/22


14/22

4. Actors profiling

What techniques can we use to further qualifythe issues?

can we use associational logic to produce

typologies of hashtags?

Elements of hashtag profiling

URL profiling: identifying & categorising hostsmentioned together with hashtag.

Actor profiling: identifying key actors using thehashtag.


15/22


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17/22

3. Associational profile

Identifying hashtag lifelines throughrelational profiles.

Associational profiles: Detectchanging co-hashtag relations over

time.

Which hashtags co-occur with each

other?

Stable or fluctuating association?


18/22

Associational profiling


19/22


20/22

Comparison #environment & #drought


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Conclusion

www.issuemapping.net

How does media liveliness map into issueliveliness?

Media-liveliness: bursty hashtags, hashtagdecline.

Can we conceive of medium-specificity and issue

specificity as a spectrum?

Can we establish it empirically?


22/22

Thank you.

la sociología en twitter

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