Mapping a Twitter scholarly communication network: a case of the association of internet researchers’ conference

Abstract

This paper investigates how scholars in the digital humanities use Twitter for informal scholarly communication. In particular, the paper observes the hosting of an annual conference over a number of years by one association in order to see whether there was a change in the network configuration structure, the influential scholars in the network, the information sources, and the tweet contents. Annual conferences held by the Association of Internet Researchers over 3 years are used for data collection. According to our result, while the Twitter communication network developed into a bigger network, the basic form of the network configuration remained stable as a Tight Crowd structure and the core influential people were not much changed. Analyses on information source and content found topic changes in each year but consistency in the kind of information source and content.