Conference proceeding
Twitter Zombie: Architecture for Capturing, Socially Transforming and Analyzing the Twittersphere
PROCEEDINGS OF THE 17TH ACM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SUPPORTING GROUP WORK, pp 229-238
01 Jan 2012
Abstract
Social computational systems emerge in the wild on popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, but there remains confusion about the relationship between social interactions and the technical traces of interaction left behind through use. Twitter interactions and social experience are particularly challenging to make sense of because of the wide range of tools used to access Twitter (text message, website, iPhone, TweetDeck and others), and the emergent set of practices for annotating message context (hashtags, reply to's and direct messaging). Further, Twitter is used as a back channel of communication in a wide range of contexts, ranging from disaster relief to watching television. Our study examines Twitter as a transport protocol that is used differently in different sociotechnical contexts, and presents an analysis of how researchers might begin to approach studies of Twitter interactions with a more reflexive stance toward the application programming interfaces (APIs) Twitter provides. We conduct a careful review of existing literature examining socio-technical phenomena on Twitter, revealing a collective inconsistency in the description of data gathering and analysis methods. In this paper, we present a candidate architecture and methodological approach for examining specific parts of the Twittersphere. Our contribution begins a discussion among social media researchers on the topic of how to systematically and consistently make sense of the social phenomena that emerge through Twitter. This work supports the comparative analysis of Twitter studies and the development of social media theories.
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Details
- Title
- Twitter Zombie: Architecture for Capturing, Socially Transforming and Analyzing the Twittersphere
- Creators
- Alan Black - Drexel UniversityChristopher Mascaro - Drexel UniversityMichael Gallagher - Drexel UniversitySean P. Goggins - Drexel UniversityACM
- Publication Details
- PROCEEDINGS OF THE 17TH ACM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SUPPORTING GROUP WORK, pp 229-238
- Conference
- 17TH ACM INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SUPPORTING GROUP WORK, 17th
- Publisher
- Assoc Computing Machinery
- Number of pages
- 10
- Resource Type
- Conference proceeding
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Information Science
- Web of Science ID
- WOS:000312603400028
- Scopus ID
- 2-s2.0-84870283782
- Other Identifier
- 991019170121004721
InCites Highlights
Data related to this publication, from InCites Benchmarking & Analytics tool:
- Web of Science research areas
- Computer Science, Hardware & Architecture
- Computer Science, Theory & Methods