Katrin Weller

Twitter and Society

Since its launch in 2006, Twitter has evolved from a niche service to a mass phenomenon; it has become instrumental for everyday communication as well as for political debates, crisis communication, marketing, and cultural participation. But the basic idea behind it has stayed the same: users may post short messages (tweets) of up to 140 characters and follow the updates posted by other users. Drawing on the experience of leading international Twitter researchers from a variety of disciplines and contexts, this is the first book to document the various notions and concepts of Twitter communication, providing a detailed and comprehensive overview of current research into the uses of Twitter. It also presents methods for analyzing Twitter data and outlines their practical application in different research contexts.

Social Media and Altmetrics: An Overview of Current Alternative Approaches to Measuring Scholarly Impact

This chapter describes the current state of the art in altmetrics research and practice. Altmetrics—evaluation methods of scholarly activities that serve as alternatives to citation-based metrics—are a relatively new but quickly growing area of research. For example, researchers are expecting that altmetrics that are based on social media data will reflect a broader public’s perception of science and will provide timely reactions to new scientific findings. This chapter explains how altmetrics have emerged and how they are related to the academic use of social media. It also provides an overview of current altmetric tools and potential data sources for computing alternative metrics, such as blogs, Twitter, social bookmarking services, and Wikipedia.

Accepting the challenges of social media research

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce a new viewpoint series, Monitoring the Media: Spotlight on Social Media Research, by providing an overview of the key challenges in social media research and some current initiatives in addressing them. Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers publication output from disciplines dealing with social media studies and summarises the key challenges as discussed in the broader research community. Findings – The paper suggests that challenges originate both from the interdisciplinary nature of social media research and from the ever-changing research landscape. It concludes that, whilst the community is addressing some challenges, others require more attention. Originality/value – The paper summarises key challenges of social media and will be of interest to researchers in different disciplines, as well as a general audience, wanting to learn about how social media data are used for research.

Trying to understand social media users and usage: The forgotten features of social media platforms

Purpose – The purpose of this paper from the series “Monitoring the Media: Spotlight on Social Media Research” is to look into different approaches to study uses of social media platforms – from user statistics to motivations for using specific features within a platform. Design/methodology/approach – Based on a literature review some general findings on social media usage are summarized alongside with examples of user activities that are rarely studied. Findings – The paper concludes that social media research has neglected to question the use of more recent features in social media platforms, such as Twitter favorites or Facebook hashtags, as well as the more “destructive” activities in social networking such as unfollowing. Originality/value – The paper draws attention to some features of popular social media platforms which are currently understudied. It raises awareness for these specific gaps in social media research and could inspire future studies to close the gap.

A manifesto for data sharing in social media research

More and more researchers want to share research data collected from social media to allow for reproducibility and comparability of results. With this paper we want to encourage them to pursue this aim -- despite initial obstacles that they may face. Sharing can occur in various, more or less formal ways. We provide background information that allows researchers to make a decision about whether, how and where to share depending on their specific situation (data, platform, targeted user group, research topic etc.). Ethical, legal and methodological considerations are important for making this decision. Based on these three dimensions we develop a framework for social media sharing that can act as a first set of guidelines to help social media researchers make practical decisions for their own projects. In the long run, different stakeholders should join forces to enable better practices for data sharing for social media researchers. This paper is intended as our call to action for the broader research community to advance current practices of data sharing in the future.

Chapter 9 Assessing the Impact of Online Academic Videos

Purpose – The web provides scholars with mechanisms to publish new types of outputs, including videos. Little is known about which scholarly videos are successful, however, and whether their impact can be measured to give appropriate credit to their creators. This article examines online academic videos to discover which types are popular and whether view counts could be used to judge their value. Methodology/approach – The study uses a content analysis of YouTube videos tweeted by academics: one random sample and one popular sample. Findings – The results show that the most popular videos produced by identifiable academics are those aimed at a general audience and which are edited rather than having a simple format. It seems that the audience for typical academic videos is so small that video production in most cases cannot be justified in terms of viewer numbers alone. Practical implications – For the typical scholar, videos should be produced for niche audiences to support other activities rather than as an end in themselves. For dissemination videos, in contrast, view counts can be used as a good indicator of failure or popularity, although translating popularity into impact is not straightforward.

Science and technology in the region: The output of regional science and technology, its strengths and its leading institutions

SummaryWe operationalize scientific output in a region by means of the number of articles (as in the SciSearch database) per year and technology output by means of the number of patent applications (as in the database of the European Patent Office) per priority year. All informetric analyses were done using the DIALOG online-system. The main research questions are the following: Which scientific and technological fields or topics are most influent within a region and which institutions or companies are mainly publishing articles or holding patents? Do the distributions of regional science and technology fields and of publishing institutions follow the well-known informetric function? Are there - as it is expected - only few fields and few institutions which dominate the region? Is there a connection between the economic power of a region and the regional publication and patent output? Examples studied in detail are seven German regions: Aachen, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Köln (Cologne), Leipzig - Halle - Dessau, München (Munich), and Stuttgart. Three different indicators were used, science and technology attraction of a region (number of scientific articles and patents), science and technology intensity (articles and patents per 1,000 inhabitants), and science and technology density (articles and patents per 1 billion EURO gross value added). Top region concerning both attraction and intensity is Munich, concerning density it is Aachen.

I always feel it must be great to be a hacker!: the role of interdisciplinary work in social media research

This paper presents first results from a series of qualitative interviews with social media researchers concerning their methods, objectives and challenges in dealing with social media data for their research. Twenty face-to-face, semi-structured interviews were conducted with researchers who have a social science background and work in different disciplines. The interviews were transcribed and coded. While many dimensions were identified concerning the whole research process of social media studies, this paper focuses on the dimension of interdisciplinarity in social media research. It looks at how social scientists describe the need for (interdisciplinary) collaboration and what experiences they have made in working with computer scientists in particular.

Social Semantic Corporate Digital Libraries: Joining Knowledge Representation and Knowledge Management

Through a theoretical review of the literature, this chapter assesses the potential of different knowledge organisation systems (KOS) to support corporate knowledge management systems (KMS), namely digital libraries (DL) in companies and other institutions. Questions are framed through which the chapter discusses how classical KOS, such as nomenclatures, classification systems, thesauri and ontologies, are able to reflect explicit knowledge in sense of the Semantic Web and also introduces persons as documents along with folksonomies as a means for externalising implicit knowledge in sense of the Web 2.0.

Twitter as a first draft of the present: and the challenges of preserving it for the future

This paper provides a framework for understanding Twitter as a historical source. We address digital humanities scholars to enable the transfer of concepts from traditional source criticism to new media formats, and to encourage the preservation of Twitter as a cultural artifact. Twitter has established itself as a key social media platform which plays an important role in public, real-time conversation. Twitter is also unique as its content is being archived by a public institution (the Library of Congress). In this paper we will show that we still have to assume that much of the contextual information beyond the pure tweet texts is already lost, and propose additional objectives for preservation.