Enabled backchannel: conference Twitter use by digital humanists

Abstract

PurposeTo date, few studies have been undertaken to make explicit how microblogging technologies are used by and can benefit scholars. This paper investigates the use of Twitter by an academic community, and poses the following questions: does the use of a Twitter enabled backchannel enhance the conference experience, collaboration and the co-construction of knowledge? How is microblogging used within an academic conference setting, and can we articulate the benefits it may bring to a discipline? Prominent Tweeters were identified and a small qualitative survey was undertaken to ascertain individuals' attitudes towards a Twitter enabled backchannel. Findings Draft for comment2 Conference hashtagged Twitter activity does not constitute a single distributed conversation but, rather multiple monologues with a few intermittent, discontinuous, loosely joined dialogues between users. The digital backchannel constitutes a multidirectional complex space in which the users make notes, share resources, hold discussions and ask questions as well as establishing a clear individual online presence. The use of Twitter as a platform for conference backchannels enables the community to expand communication and participation of events amongst its members. The analysis revealed the close knit nature of the DH researcher community, which may be somewhat intimidating for those new to the field or conference. Practical implicationsThis study has indicated that, given Twitter is becoming increasingly important for academic communities, new, dedicated methodologies for the analysis and understanding of Tweet based corpora are necessary. Routinely used textual analysis tools cannot be applied to corpora of tweets in a straightforward manner, due to the creative and fragmentary nature of language used within microblogging. In this paper, a method has been suggesting to categorize tweets using open coded analysis to facilitate understanding of tweet based corpora, which could be adopted by other studies. Originality/valueThis paper is the first exhaustive study that we are aware of concentrating on how microblogging technologies such as twitter are used by and can benefit scholars. This data set provides both a valuable insight into the prevalence of a variety of Twitter practices within the constraints of a conference setting, and highlights the need for methodologies to be developed to analyse social media streams such as twitter feeds. It also provides a comprehensive bibliography of other research into microblogging.

Social media use in the research workflow

“…A number of other researchers have pointed to Twitter being used at conferences. 3,4 In order to share images and videos, 69% of researchers who did so used YouTube, 14% used SlideShare, and 12% Flickr. Obviously, these three tools have three different applications.…”

It’s All About Information? The Following Behaviour of Professors and PhD Students in Computer Science on Twitter

“…Priem and Costello (2010) studied whether and how scholars cite on Twitter by interviewing scholars and analysing their tweets. Their study showed the relevance of Twitter for researchers beyond conferences (as pointed out by Ross et al, 2011) and therefore substantiated the need for more holistic analyses of how researchers use Twitter. Weller et al (2011) focused on tweets containing conference-related hashtags and extended the view of Twitter citations introduced by Priem and Costello (2010) to retweets and mentions.…”

“…Ross et al (2011) described Twitter as an ideal medium to establish a "more participatory conference culture" by expanding communication and participation. Consequently, Twitter usage during academic conferences is the focal point of several analyses (Ebner, 2009;Letierce et al, 2010;Weller et al, 2011;Wen et al, 2014).…”

“…Following the approach of Lin et al (2014) and motivated by the findings of Ross et al (2011), they constructed networks of users based on replies, mentions, and retweets. Although they found an increase in the information sharing activities of users from 2009 to 2013, actions indicating conversations between users are found to remain stable.…”

Use of Twitter among Spanish communication-area faculty: Research, teaching and visibility

“…Others state that the use of SNS is deeply related to civic engagement (Brandtzaeg and Heim, 2011) or to spread information about conferences (Ross, et al, 2011).…”