Twitter Archive Research Articles

Drug Use in the Twittersphere: A Qualitative Contextual Analysis of Tweets About Prescription Drugs

Tweets about prescription opioid use may reveal insights into the prescription drug epidemic. We qualitatively assessed 2,100 tweets about prescription opioids utilizing a Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet® and determined whether the tweet represented: abuse (i.e., use to get high), not abuse (i.e., use as analgesic), or was not characterizable (e.g., “I need a Percocet”) and whether the connotation was positive (i.e. promote psychoactive or analgesic use), negative (i.e., adverse event), or not characterizable. Abuse was commonly described and the majority of terms (>66%) represented a positive connotation. Twitter can be a resource to observe trends in perceptions about prescription opioid use.

The Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress: Challenges for information practice and information policy

In April 2010, the U.S. Library of Congress and the popular micro-blogging company Twitter announced that every public tweet, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library and made available to researchers. The Library of Congress’ planned digital archive of all public tweets holds great promise for the research community, yet, over five years since its announcement, the archive remains unavailable. This paper explores the challenges faced by the Library that have prevented the timely realization of this valuable archive, divided into two categories: challenges involving practice, such as how to organize the tweets, how to provide useful means of retrieval, how to physically store them; and challenges involving policy, such as the creation of access controls to the archive, whether any information should be censored or restricted, and the broader ethical considerations of the very existence of such an archive, especially privacy and user control.

The Use of Twitter in Large Lecture Courses: Do the Students See a Benefit?

The purpose of this two-year quantitative study was to determine the usefulness of the micro-blogging tool Twitter in large classes for improving the students’ sense of community and belonging. Three instructors of large classes were recruited to test the outcomes of using Twitter as a learning tool, one each from the Departments of Geography and Psychology, and the College of Nursing. Twitter was used as a learning tool to allow students to engage in discussion and ask questions in real time during class as well as outside of class. The method used by the authors included surveys that measured students’ perception of their sense of community and belonging, their engagement with the Twitter portion of the course, and their thoughts on the use of Twitter for academic purposes in a higher-education classroom setting. Data about students’ use of Twitter was further collected using the Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet tool. The authors conclude this study showed that Twitter, if integrated into the course and supported by instructor and/or assistants who are familiar with the use of Twitter, improved the sense of community reported by students.

The Dramatic Increase in Social Media in Urology

Social media are established tools for rapid information dissemination to a broad audience. A major use has been the compilation of conference specific messaging known as tweets via preselected hashtags on Twitter. We analyzed Twitter use between consecutive years at the AUA (American Urological Association) and CUA (Canadian Urological Association) annual meetings. Publicly available tweets containing the established meeting hashtags were abstracted from an online archive. Tweets were categorized by author type and by content as informative (based on research presented at the conference) or uninformative (unrelated to presented data) according to an established classification scheme. We analyzed 5,402 tweets during the combined 18 meeting days, of which 4,098 were original and 1,304 were rebroadcast prior tweets. There was a large increase in Twitter use at the 2013 annual meetings compared to the 2012meetings (4,591 tweets from a total of 540 accounts vs 811 from 134). Biotechnology analysts represented the highest volume of tweets (226 or 28%) in 2012 but in 2013 this majority shifted to urologists (2,765 or 60%). Of the tweets 29% were categorized as informative in 2012, which increased to 41% at the 2013meetings. Twitter has emerged as a significant communication platform at urological meetings. Use increased dramatically between 2012 and 2013. Urologists have increasingly led this discussion with an increased focus on data arising from meeting proceedings. This adjunct to traditional meeting activity merits the attention of urologists and the professional associations that host suchmeetings.

Mining One Percent of Twitter: Collections, Baselines, Sampling

The objective of the paper is to reflect on the affordances of different techniques for making Twitter collections and to suggest the use of a random sampling technique, made possible by Twitter’s Streaming API (Application Programming Interface), for baselining, scoping, and contextualising practices and issues. It discusses this technique by analysing a one per cent sample of all tweets posted during a 24-hour period and introducing a number of analytical directions considered useful for qualifying some of the core elements of the platform, in particular hashtags. To situate the proposal, the report first discusses how platforms propose particular affordances but leave considerable margins for the emergence of a wide variety of practices. This argument is then related to the question of how medium and sampling technique are intrinsically connected. Background Social media platforms present numerous challenges to empirical research, making it different from researching cases in offline environments, but also different from studying the “open” Web. Because of the limited access possibilities and the sheer size of platforms like Facebook or Twitter, the question of delimitation, i.e. the selection of subsets to analyse, is particularly relevant. Whilst sampling techniques have been thoroughly discussed in the context of social science research, sampling procedures in the context of social media analysis are far from being fully understood. Even for Twitter, a platform having received considerable attention from empirical researchers due to its relative openness to data collection, methodology is largely emergent. In particular the question of how smaller collections relate to the entirety of activities of the platform is quite unclear. Recent work comparing case based studies to gain a broader picture and the development of graph theoretical methods for sampling are certainly steps in the right direction, but it seems that truly large-scale Twitter studies are limited to computer science departments, where epistemic orientation can differ considerably from work done in the humanities and social sciences.

List

List

Twitter Archives and the Challenges of "Big Social Data" for Media and Communication Research

Twitter Archives and the Challenges of "Big Social Data" for Media and Communication Research