Tools for the Analysis and Visualization of Twitter Language Data

The microblogging service Twitter provides vast amounts of user-generated language data. In this article I give an overview of related work on Twitter as an object of study. I also describe the anatomy of a Twitter message and discuss typical uses of the Twitter platform. The Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) will be introduced in a generic, non-technical way to provide a basic under-standing of existing opportunities but also limitations when working with Twitter data. I propose a basic classification system for existing tools that can be used for collecting and analyzing Twitter data and introduce some exemplary tools for each category. Then, I present a more comprehensive work-flow for conducting studies with Twitter data, which comprises the following steps: crawling, annotation, analysis and visualization. Finally, I illustrate the generic workflow by describing an exemplary study from the context of social TV research. At the end of the article, the main issues concerning tools and methods for the analysis of Twitter data are briefly addressed

How Misinformation and Mistrust Compound the Threat of Epidemics

This thesis was conducted to study the effects of misinformation and medical mistrust on the public health field. I use the events of the Chapare Virus outbreak in Bolivia in the summer of 2019 and the public dialogue during that time period to discuss these themes. I used data from market survey\u27s in La Paz, newspaper articles from Página Siete, and Tweets from the time period of the outbreak. My findings suggest that misinformation and medical mistrust affected public health measures, which has major implications for the way the public health field should address future public health events

More than Liking and Bookmarking? Towards Understanding Twitter Favouriting Behaviour

Microblogging services, such as Twitter, offer a variety of interactive features that allow users to engage with contacts in their social network and the content they produce. One such feature is the favourite button on Twitter, an icon in the form of a star that users can click on to assign a special status to a particular tweet. Despite evidence suggesting that users increasingly make use of favouriting, little is known about the reasons people have for favouriting or the utility the feature offers. This contrasts with other core features, such as “following” and “retweeting”, which have been studied extensively. In this paper we argue that by investigating the motivations for favouriting tweets we can enhance our understanding of what people want to achieve with Twitter and the types of content users find interesting or useful. With these goals in mind we conducted a large-scale survey (n=606), questioning Twitter users on various aspects of their favouriting behaviour. Of these users only 395 were aware of the function and 290 make use of the functionality. The survey responses from these users demonstrate that motives for favouriting tweets are extremely heterogeneous and not always consistent within and between users. Moreover, our findings reveal that user needs when favouriting such as the need for re-finding a tweet or the wish for a more private conversation are often poorly supported and sometimes even go unmet by the Twitter user interface

Twitter card : exploring the feature and adding new services

This study examines the Twitter card, a feature that adds a preview for rich content links included in tweets. Previous research has not cover this recently added feature, though it has an obvious impact on the user interaction with his/her timeline and provides a new way of representing the user interface. At the same time, a default Twitter client has a major drawback – the number of web services that are officially supported is quite small. This study explores the possible future of Twitter card and presents a prototype application that shows what will happen if all the links will have previews, how this can be implemented and what users think about it. The prototype application was developed using HTML/CSS/JavaScript, PhoneGap framework and ported to Android operating system. The source code of the application is provided as part of this research. This study provides also user experience evaluation of Twitter card and the prototype application, and finds out the improvements in the hedonistic perception of the service if the number of supported services increases

Campañas políticas en Twitter : un análisis de las dinámicas de información en la elección a la Alcaldía de Bogotá de 2015

Este análisis de uso de la res social Twitter, en el caso de las elecciones a la alcaldía de Bogotá 2015, pretende avizorar de cerca los fenómenos de comunicación política en línea dados en las diferentes campañas electorales para estudiar la forma en que los políticos se vinculan con las especificidades de la plataforma, las cuales abren campo a diferentes niveles de interactividad y flujos de información, mediante un análisis descriptivo de carácter cuantitativo se escudriñaron las cuentas de los candidatos teniendo en cuenta conceptos relacionados a los affordances, al engagement y a la tipología del contenido.Comunicador (a) SocialPregrad

Exploring teachers’ professional development with Twitter: A sociomaterial analysis

“BEST. PD. EVER!” Some teachers make bold claims for the way that Twitter supports their professional development, yet research into this area is rather limited. This study sought to gain a better understanding of the practices involved and the part that Twitter plays. It uses a sociomaterial sensibility informed by actor-network theory (ANT) to unravel the complex webs of relations which form, break apart and reform when knowledge practices are enacted in the mediated arena of Twitter. To explore this rich but messy environment, I evoke the spirit of the Parisian flâneur to develop an ethnographic approach I refer to as ‘flânography.’ Characterised by purposeful wandering, the approach coupled participant observation and interviews, with emerging methods involving a bot and a 'walkie-talkie' app. Adopting the sensibility of the flâneur consistently through data collection, analysis and presentation resulted in traversals which render pathways of experience. This led to me presenting the findings in three ‘Gatherings’ (Law, 2004a), each taking a tweet or other data snippet as a point of departure. Through the Gatherings I present the activities of both human and nonhuman participants, establish how they came together (or didn’t) and gain a better appreciation of the outcomes of those interrelationships. In reading across the Gatherings, two interlocking dimensions emerged through which teachers' learning practices on Twitter might be conceptualised. ‘Compound learning’ describes how practices can be understood through three meanings of compound: framed chemically (through formation of bonds and associations), financially (like interest which grows cumulatively) and as a mixture (an assortment of actors engaged in activities). The second dimension describes how compound learning can be enacted across three ‘scales:’ acts, activities and practices. By extending previous research, this thesis contributes a richer and deeper understanding of what ‘Twitter Professional Development’ involves, thereby helping to legitimise it within broader professional development discourse. Adding to the current literature on teachers’ professional learning, this thesis reveals how significant personal-isation is in two senses: that teachers can exercise choice in what, when and how they learn; and secondly, the importance of being able to forge socio-professional connections with fellow educators in different ways. The flânographic approach and the new methods which arose within it offer wider contributions for studies exploring activities which range across online and offline spaces, and through time