Digital Methods for Hashtag Engagement Research

Abstract

This article seeks to contribute to the field of digital research by critically accounting for the relationship between hashtags and their forms of grammatization—the platform techno-materialization process of online activity. We approach hashtags as sociotechnical formations that serve social media research not only as criteria in corpus selection but also displaying the complexity of the online engagement and its entanglement with the technicity of web platforms. Therefore, the study of hashtag engagement requires a grasping of the functioning of the platform itself (technicity) along with the platform grammatization. In this respect, we propose the three-layered (3L) perspective for addressing hashtag engagement. The first contemplates potential differences between high-visibility and ordinary hashtag usage culture, its related actors, and content. The second focuses on hashtagging activity and the repurposing of how hashtags can be differently embedded into social media databases. The last layer looks particularly into the images and texts to which hashtags are brought to relation. To operationalize the 3L framework, we draw on the case of the “impeachment-cum-coup” of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. When cross-read, the three layers add value to one another, providing also difference visions of the high-visibility and ordinary groups.

Los inicios de la pandemia de COVID19 en Twitter. Análisis computacional de la conversación pública en lengua española

“…Su estructura se centra en la comunicación de mensajes instantáneos y de rápida circulación sobre eventos relevantes del presente, entre una extensa comunidad internacional de usuarios que comparten intereses temáticos diversos (Bruns & Weller, 2016). Funciona como plataforma donde usuarios ordinarios comparten sus opiniones sobre diversos asuntos y como un medio para difundir mensajes producidos por usuarios de alta visibilidad (Kwak et al, 2010;Colleoni et al, 2014), definidos como usuarios que reciben muchos seguidores y logran gran cantidad de adhesión, por lo que sus mensajes tienen mayor posibilidad de propagarse (Omena et al, 2020). La conexión entre usuarios de alta visibilidad y ordinarios se hace posible mediante una serie de operaciones técnicas y métricas, tales como la cantidad de retuits y favoritos, o el uso de hashtags para seguir conversaciones públicas en tiempo real, sin barreras geográficas (Bruns & Highfield, 2016).…”

Vernacular Visibility and Algorithmic Resistance in the Public Expression of Latin American Feminism

“…Subset 1 consisted of posts published by the ten users with the highest visibility by platform. These users received the highest engagement in terms of likes, views and retweet metrics and made up the smallest part of a sample (Omena et al, 2020). The criterion for selecting the subset was that the engagement rate exceeded 20% of the total sample and that the post gathered over 2000 reactions.…”

“…Data analysis was conducted from a cross-platform and multimodal perspective. The analysis considered the complexity of the data, consisting of images, text, hashtags and links between users (Pearce et al, 2018), while also taking into account the high visibility actors involved (Omena et al, 2020) in the studied issues.…”

“…Poised at the intersection of feminism and media studies, this article seeks to understand, on the one hand, how Latin American feminist public expression has gained algorithm-mediated visibility on social media, and, on the other, to determine how algorithmic visibility shapes feminism when its claims converge with platform vernaculars, defined as ‘shared conventions and grammars of communication which emerge from the ongoing interaction between platforms and users’ (Gibbs et al, 2015: 257). This study approaches the subject through a comparative multimodal analysis of a set of feminist public messages posted on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok by high-visibility actors (Omena et al, 2020) about AL and VAW.…”

Reposting “till Albert Einstein is TikTok famous”: The Memetic Construction of Science on TikTok

“…Vernacular creativity can be defined as new media-empowered productive articulation of communicative practices and their amalgamation with older popular traditions (Burgess, 2006). In more recent social media research, vernacular creativity has been further applied to study the local specificity of creative expressions and folklores, both textual and imaginary (De Seta, 2018;Gibbs, Meese, Arnold, Nansen, & Carter, 2015;Pearce et al, 2020). While both Burgess's (2006) original theorization and its recent application focus on cultural production, in our study, we extended this concept to research knowledge production in the context of video memes on TikTok.…”