Researching with Twitter timeline data: A demonstration via “everyday” socio-political talk around welfare provision

Increasingly, social media platforms are understood by researchers to be valuable sites of politically-relevant discussions. However, analyses of social media data are typically undertaken by focusing on ‘snapshots’ of issues using query-keyword search strategies. This paper develops an alternative, less issue-based, mode of analysing Twitter data. It provides a framework for working qualitatively with longitudinally-oriented Twitter data (user-timelines), and uses an empirical case to consider the value and the challenges of doing so. Exploring how Twitter users place “everyday” talk around the socio-political issue of UK welfare provision, we draw on digital ethnography and narrative analysis techniques to analyse 25 user-timelines and identify three distinctions in users’ practices: users’ engagements with welfare as TV entertainment or as a socio-political concern; the degree of sustained engagement with said issues, and; the degree to which users’ tweeting practices around welfare were congruent with or in contrast to their other tweets. With this analytic orientation, we demonstrate how a longitudinal analysis of user-timelines provides rich resources that facilitate a more nuanced understanding of user engagement in everyday socio-political discussions online

Reading Videogames as (authorless) Literature

This article presents the outcomes of research, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in England and informed by work in the fields of new literacy research, gaming studies and the socio-cultural framing of education, for which the videogame L.A. Noire (Rockstar Games, 2011) was studied within the orthodox framing of the English Literature curriculum at A Level (pre-University) and Undergraduate (degree level). There is a plethora of published research into the kinds of literacy practices evident in videogame play, virtual world engagement and related forms of digital reading and writing (Gee, 2003; Juul, 2005; Merchant, Gillen, Marsh and Davies, 2012; Apperley and Walsh, 2012; Bazalgette and Buckingham, 2012) as well as the implications of such for home / school learning (Dowdall, 2006; Jenkins, 2006; Potter, 2012) and for teachers’ own digital lives (Graham, 2012). Such studies have tended to focus on younger children and this research is also distinct from such work in the field in its exploration of the potential for certain kinds of videogame to be understood as 'digital transformations' of conventional ‘schooled’ literature. The outcomes of this project raise implications of such a conception for a further implementation of a ‘reframed’ literacy (Marsh, 2007) within the contemporary curriculum of a traditional and conservative ‘subject’. A mixed methods approach was adopted. Firstly, students contributing to a gamplay blog requiring them to discuss their in-game experience through the ‘language game’ of English Literature, culminating in answering a question constructed with the idioms of the subject’s set text ‘final examination’. Secondly, students taught their teachers to play L.A. Noire, with free choice over the context for this collaboration. Thirdly, participants returned to traditional roles in order to work through a set of study materials provided, designed to reproduce the conventions of the ‘study guide’ for literature education. Interviews were conducted after each phase and the outcomes informed a redrafting of the study materials which are now available online for teachers – this being the ‘practical’ outcome of the research (Berger and McDougall, 2012). In the act of inserting the study of L.A. Noire into the English Literature curriculum as currently framed, this research moves, through a practical ‘implementation’ beyond longstanding debates around narratology and ludology (Frasca, 2003; Juul, 2005) in the field of game studies (Leaning, 2012) through a direct connection to new literacy studies and raises epistemological questions about ‘subject identity’, informed by Bernstein (1996) and Bourdieu (1986) and the implications for digital transformations of texts for both ideas about cultural value in schooled literacy (Kendall and McDougall, 2011) and the politics of ‘expertise’ in pedagogic relations (Ranciere, 2009, Bennett, Kendall and McDougall, 2012a)

WebSci '19 : Proceedings

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 11th ACM Conference on Web Science (Websci'19), June 30 -- July 3, 2019, Boston, MA, USA. This year, the conference theme is "Synergies for the Good: The Web and Society". We welcomed interdisciplinary contributions, especially those that had a broad perspective on the web, including those that combined analyses of web data with other types of data (e.g., from surveys or interviews) to better understand user behavior (online and offline); carried out longitudinal studies; presented successful cases of interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary web research; used mixed-method approaches; critically reflected on the methods used; discussed responsible forms of Web Science (e.g. regarding standards, methods, generalizability of results); and/or those that reflected on the societal impact of web research, how the web is perceived in the media and in society, and whether this clashes with our self-image of Web Science. Thus, research on the interaction of society and the web was invited, and we received submissions highlighting web implications, synergies derived, and how the web as a socio-technical system will evolve in future. WebSci'19 was a unique conference where a multitude of disciplines converged in a creative and critical dialogue with the aim of understanding the web and its impacts. WebSci'19 welcomed participation from diverse fields including (but not limited to) art, anthropology, computer and information sciences, communication, economics, humanities, informatics, law, linguistics, philosophy, political science, psychology, and sociology. Following the tradition of earlier conferences, contributions to WebSci'19 aimed to cross traditional disciplinary boundaries. The community engaged with novel and thought-provoking ideas and discussed original research, work in progress, analysis, and practice in the field of Web Science, its current theoretical, methodological, and epistemological challenges as well as Web practices of individuals, collectives, institutions, and platforms. This year we were very pleased to accept 41 submissions for the regular research track chosen out of 130 submissions. We are grateful for the support of the Program Committee which consisted of 16 senior members and 66 regular members who selected an interesting, varied, exciting program comprising 31 long and 10 short papers. In addition to the posters selected from the Call for Posters, eight contributions were invited to be presented as a poster because they sparked fruitful discussions among the reviewers and were deemed to be of great interest and relevance to the WebSci'19 community. This year WebSci'19 encouraged authors to particularly prepare and publish reproducibility information of conducted research and resources, such as source code and datasets. Authors were asked to add (if possible) a link (e.g. DOI or URL) to data or any other information relevant to their submission. With this measure WebSci'19 aimed at raising awareness of the reproducibility issue and demonstrated that, as a community-driven conference, it subscribes to and actively promotes Open Science principles in resear

Characterizing Interactions among Members of Deaf Communities in Orkut

Part 1: Long and Short PapersInternational audienceThis paper presents a characterization of interaction phenomena among members of communities aimed at deaf people in an online social network system, namely Orkut. The results revealed that members of deaf communities are tighter than members of other communities. However, analysis of the interface indicates that it does not always address their specific needs