Twitter and Academic Geography through the Lens of #AAG2018

Abstract

Twitter has emerged as a global social network of active users who share conversations with one another in an online setting. Academics are one community that has increasingly taken to Twitter as a means of connecting with other scholars, sharing research, and obtaining meaningful feedback. Tweeting has become especially popular during academic conferences where conference attendees use Twitter hashtags to filter conference conversations into a separate dialogue. For geographers, the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG) represents one such occasion to use Twitter to discuss contemporary developments in geographic research. In this article, we provide an overview of Twitter as well as the ways in which the academic community uses the platform. Following this, we discuss the tweets sent using the hashtag for the 2018 AAG Annual Meeting, #AAG2018. To analyze these tweets, we collected all tweets with this hashtag for a period of four weeks and examined the content using word clouds and sentiment analysis to explore general feelings and trends associated with geography and the AAG Annual Meeting. We conclude with suggestions for future research avenues that could use Twitter data to gauge the pulse of the geographic discipline. Key Words: academic conferences, American Association of Geographers, geography, sentiment analysis, Twitter.