Twitter and Academic Geography through the Lens of #AAG2018

Fekete, Emily; Haffner, Matthew

doi:10.1080/00330124.2019.1622428

Cited by 9 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…For senior academics, the majority said that they have attended more than 20 conferences, but the number of conferences where they have used Twitter was mostly between one and five conferences. This finding reflects the increasing use of Twitter at conferences, particularly in the past five years (Fekete & Haffner, 2019).…”

Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 86%

“…Twitter account metadata are mostly identifiable; thus, affiliations and some interests can be identified and traced in the social network graphs. Moreover, the popularity of social media use at conferences, particularly Twitter, continues to grow (Fekete & Haffner, 2019; Mazarakis & Peters, 2015); therefore, yearly and biyearly conferences in Australia and overseas are likely to continue to generate data sets for analysis using various techniques. To take advantage of these freely available data sources, it would be useful to conduct longitudinal analysis of Twitter conference data sets to investigate how clusters and connections change and if Twitter user behaviour changes over time.…”

Section: Discussion and Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gibson and Gibbs (2013) note that travelling to international conferences is expensive; thus, AUSCCER has employed social media to mitigate geographical marginality and increase proximity to other academic hubs, at least in a virtual sense. To this end, using social media platforms such as Twitter at professional conferences is now commonplace and is referred to as a digital backchannel in a shared physical space (Fekete & Haffner, 2019; Kimmons & Veletsianos, 2016; McCarthy & Boyd, 2005). Usefully, digital data generated by social media platforms can provide a portrait of group behaviour at unprecedented scales and levels of detail (Giles, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Institutional and cross‐institutional research clusters: A community detection analysis of #IAG2019Hobart

Williamson

2020

Geographical Research

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Academic conferences create an opportunity to disseminate new research, network with like‐minded researchers, and make new connections. The use of Twitter at these conferences continues to expand. This article focuses on how the Twitter data generated during conferences can be visually analysed in terms of community detection, connectivity, and information flows. Using social network analysis techniques and an online survey, the article analyses the subgroups within the entire network, their institutional affiliations, and research interest, and then focuses on the roles of the highly connected Twitter uses in the network. Through in‐depth analysis, the data revealed both how Australian geography academics use Twitter during a conference and how they cluster based on affiliations and research interest and also identified the information bridges in the social media conference network generated by using #IAG2019Hobart. The article concludes with some recommendations for further research.

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Section: Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 86%

Section: Discussion and Recommendationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Institutional and cross‐institutional research clusters: A community detection analysis of #IAG2019Hobart

Williamson

2020

Geographical Research

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“…In contrast, tweets connected to F2F events may originate from commentary/observations on individual presentations (often a single-tweet summary by a third-party observer), comments on the event itself or associated virtual and F2F social interactions, and rarely contain links to online content. For example, Fekete and Haffner (2019) found conference locationbased words, and terms associated with conference attendance, such as 'session', 'present', 'talk' or 'floor', to be the most predominant in tweets from the F2F Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers (AAG). It is difficult directly to compare the content of tweets between F2F events and TCs by placing individual words, devoid of context, in a potentially subjective, value-based framework.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Twitter conferences as a low‐carbon, far‐reaching and inclusive way of communicating research in ornithology and ecology

Caravaggi

Olin

Franklin

et al. 2021

Ibis

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Academic conferences play an important role in the scientific community by providing an opportunity for researchers to discuss their work and to network. However, drawbacks of traditional face-to-face (F2F) conferences, such as the ostensible exclusion of non-scientists, the substantial environmental footprint, and the large costs in terms of both time and money are increasingly being recognized. As a result, alternative and complementary formats are being explored. One of these is the Twitter conference (TC), in which research is presented and discussed on the social media platform Twitter. Here, we use hashtag and presenter data from several ornithology and ecology conferences (both TCs and F2F events) to explore the potential reach of the tweets and the magnitude of the difference in greenhouse gas emissions between the two conference types. We found that TCs generated greater engagement than F2F events, have the potential to reach a very large audience and result in a substantial reduction in emissions. Further, we argue that the format promotes presenter and audience diversity due to participation being flexible and virtually cost-free. While we recognize some disadvantages of this format compared to F2F events, especially in relation to the social and networking aspects of conferences, we envision that virtual events, such as TCs, will play an important role in the future of science dissemination and outreach. By embracing such opportunities, academic conferences can move towards a more inclusive and sustainable future.

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“…The AAG Regions Connect initiative in October 2021 being one example, but see alsoMartin (2022) andPadian (2018Padian ( , 2020.3 Twitter conferences appear to have begun in 2015 with the first World Seabird Twitter Conference (#wstc1) and the Royal Society of Chemistry's Twitter Poster conference (#RSCAnalyticalPoster). See also this recent analysis of Twitter as a conference backchannel at the 2018 AAG(Fekete & Haffner, 2019).4 Notably, we have always included asynchronous online elements to enable wider participation, providing audio recordings and slides of talks on our website after each event with space for comments, somewhat like the NCN model. Interestingly, we did not conceive of this as an extension of the conference, but as supplying resources subsequent to the main event.5 For an in-depth study of how academics at the remote University of Otago balance the career-building imperative to meet physically, and thus fly, with the imperative to fly less, seizing some of the opportunities that virtual meetings offer, seeHigham et al (2019).6 See, for example, the design of the EPIC2020 conference, which also used three global zones (https://2020.epicpeople.org/pangaea/index.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

‘What about the coffee break?’ Designing virtual conference spaces for conviviality

Bastian

Flatø

Baraitser

et al. 2022

Geography and Environment

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Geography, like many other disciplines, is reckoning with the carbon intensity of its practices and rethinking how activities such as annual meetings are held. The Climate Action Task Force of the American Association of Geographers (AAG), for example, was set up in 2019 and seeks to transform the annual conference in light of environmental justice concerns. Mirroring shifts in geographic practice across the globe, these efforts point to a need to understand how new opportunities for knowledge production, such as online events, can operate effectively. In this paper, we offer suggestions for best practice in virtual spaces arising from our Material Life of Time conference held in March 2021, a two-day global event that ran synchronously across 15 time zones. Given concerns about lack of opportunities for informal exchanges at virtual conferences, or the 'coffee break problem', we designed the event to focus particularly on opportunities for conviviality. This was accomplished through a focus on three key design issues: the spatial, the temporal, and the social. We review previous work on the benefits and drawbacks of synchronous and asynchronous online conference methods and the kinds of geographic communities they might support. We then describe our design approach and reflect on its effectiveness via a variety of feedback materials. We show that our design enabled high delegate satisfaction, a sense of conviviality, and strong connections with new colleagues. However, we also discuss the problems with attendance levels and external commitments that hampered shared time together. We thus call for collective efforts to support the 'event time' of online meetings, rather than expectations to fit them around everyday tasks. Even so, our results suggest that synchronous online events need not result in geographical exclusions linked to time-zone differences, and we outline further recommendations for reworking the spacetimes of the conference.

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Twitter and Academic Geography through the Lens of #AAG2018

Cited by 9 publications

References 10 publications

Institutional and cross‐institutional research clusters: A community detection analysis of #IAG2019Hobart

Institutional and cross‐institutional research clusters: A community detection analysis of #IAG2019Hobart

Twitter conferences as a low‐carbon, far‐reaching and inclusive way of communicating research in ornithology and ecology

‘What about the coffee break?’ Designing virtual conference spaces for conviviality

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