Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset, a toolset for capturing and analyzing Twitter data. Instead of just presenting a technical paper detailing the system, however, the authors argue that the type of data used for, as well as the methods encoded in, computational systems have epistemological repercussions for research. The authors thus aim at situating the development of the toolset in relation to methodological debates in the social sciences and humanities. Design/methodology/approach – The authors review the possibilities and limitations of existing approaches to capture and analyze Twitter data in order to address the various ways in which computational systems frame research. The authors then introduce the open-source toolset and put forward an approach that embraces methodological diversity and epistemological plurality. Findings – The authors find that design decisions and more general methodological reasoning can and should go hand in hand when building tools for computational social science or digital humanities. Practical implications – Besides methodological transparency, the software provides robust and reproducible data capture and analysis, and interlinks with existing analytical software. Epistemic plurality is emphasized by taking into account how Twitter structures information, by allowing for a number of different sampling techniques, by enabling a variety of analytical approaches or paradigms, and by facilitating work at the micro, meso, and macro levels. Originality/value – The paper opens up critical debate by connecting tool design to fundamental interrogations of methodology and its repercussions for the production of knowledge. The design of the software is inspired by exchanges and debates with scholars from a variety of disciplines and the attempt to propose a flexible and extensible tool that accommodates a wide array of methodological approaches is directly motivated by the desire to keep computational work open for various epistemic sensibilities.

This article examines the appropriation of social media as platforms of alternative journalism by the protestors of the 2010 G20 summit in Toronto, Canada. The Toronto Community Mobilization Network, the network that coordinated the protests, urged participants to broadcast news using Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr. This particular use of social media is studied in the light of the history and theory of alternative journalism. Analyzing a set of 11,556 tweets, 222 videos, and 3,338 photos, the article assesses user participation in social media protest reporting, as well as the resulting protest accounts. The findings suggest that social media did not facilitate the crowd-sourcing of alternative reporting, except to some extent for Twitter. As with many previous alternative journalistic efforts, reporting was dominated by a relatively small number of users. In turn, the resulting account itself had a strong event-oriented focus, mirroring often-criticized mainstream protest reporting practices.

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In this paper we introduce the device perspective as a methodological contribution to platform studies. Through an engagement with debates about the notion of affordances, which focus on the relation between the technical and the social, we put forward an approach to study the production of data within platforms by engaging with the material properties of platforms as well as their interpretation and deployment by various types of users. As a case in point, we study how the affordances of Wikipedia are deployed in the production of encyclopedic knowledge and how this can be used to study controversies. The analysis shows how Wikipedia affords unstable encyclopedic knowledge by having mechanisms in place that suggest the continuous (re)negotiation of existing knowledge. We furthermore showcase the use of our open-source software, Contropedia, which can be utilized to study knowledge production on Wikipedia.