[Air-L] Working paper on Twitter and live television

[Anstead Nicholas Dr (PSI)]

Hi all,

With apologies for cross-posting, I just wanted to share the link to a working paper that I have just co-authored with Ben O'Loughlin of Royal Holloway College, University of London. It starts to examine a sample of more than 40,000 tweets we gathered during a broadcast of BBC Question Time in the UK in October 2009. This episode was especially significant, as the programme featured Nick Griffin, leader of the far right British National Party, making it a highly controversial event.

In the paper, Ben and I talk about what we term the emerging Viewertariat - a group of viewers who use new media technology to comment on and discuss television events in real time as they watch them. We start to attempt to understand how this group functions, as part of a wider remit to understand how political engagement occurs across mediums either simultaneously or with varying time lags.

In the future, we plan to engage in a more detailed content analysis of this sample, as well as applying this method to other events, including the forthcoming UK General Election TV debates. If anyone has any feedback on the paper or suggestions for future development and collaborative/comparative studies, please do drop me an email.

You can download the full paper from here (pdf link on my blog): http://bit.ly/9nha2J and the UEA press release on the paper is available here: http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2010/feb/homepagenews/twitterquestiontime.

With best wishes, Nick

---
Nick Anstead

Lecturer in Politics,
School of Political, Social and International Studies,
University of East Anglia

[room] Arts 3.59
[email] n.anstead at uea.ac.uk
[phone] 01603 59 2888
[mobile] 07788 413 443
[blog] www.nickanstead.com/blog
[twitter] www.twitter.com/NickAnstead

Office hours (Spring term '10): Monday, 13:00-14:00 & Thursday, 12:00-13:00.