[Air-L] twitter useless to study?

[Andrew Long]

Hey, 

I agree that filtering Twitter datasets by hashtags or other means removes a lot
of junk, spam, etc. (unless you are looking at junk that is). A key event like the 
#iranelection, for instance, provides for a pretty focused collection particularly 
when compared to a random sample of the public timeline. 

It is disappointing then that Twitter themselves are becoming the major obstruction,
thanks to their recent and explicit commercial intent. 

Andrew


_________________________________________________________________
 http://andrew-long.name | Department of Information Science | School of Business
 University of Otago   |   NZ |  +64 3 479 8319   |  mailto:andrew.long at otago.ac.nz
________________________________________
From: Jeffrey Keefer [j.keefer at lancaster.ac.uk]
Sent: Sunday, 6 March 2011 12:45
To: AoIR-L Aoir
Subject: Re: [Air-L] twitter useless to study?

I agree that Twitter has an increasing amount of spam accounts, though my research has recently focused around the use of hash tags, and I have not seen much spam there yet. Alas, once that happens, then I can envision a decrease in researchability (or even use) of Twitter.

Regardless, I do think that Twitter's recent restrictions of accessing some of the very things that Google itself indexes is problematic.

-----
Jeffrey Keefer
j.keefer at lancaster.ac.uk

Blog: http://silenceandvoice.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/JeffreyKeefer
Website: http://www.jeffreykeefer.com

On Mar 4, 2011, at 9:56 PM, D.Yvette Wohn wrote:

> I think Twitter is a useful profiling tool.
> If you are following Barry Wellman *and* Lady Gaga, what does it mean? ;)
>
> @arcticpenguin
>
> On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 8:49 PM, live <human.factor.one at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I don't think it's useless to study in terms of *how* people communicate
>> digitally. Lots of linguistic cues and language changes have begun in sms
>> and then parlayed over to Twitter, where they're being solidified into
>> standard language usage.
>> Not getting the full subset of data doesn't matter if one is just studying
>> the medium itself, and less the message(s).
>>
>> Cheers,
>> @SharonG
>>
>> On Mar 4, 2011, at 3:09 PM, Barry Wellman wrote:
>>
>> As an object of study, its hard to do quant analysis of Twitter now
>>> because so much of it is spam (unless you're studying spam, that is).
>>>
>>> And even qualitative analyses will have to be careful.
>>>
>>> Our 2 Twitterology papers got into the sweet spot when Twitter was an
>>> appreciable size but before spam dominated (about 80% of my new would-be
>>> Followers)
>>>
>>> OTOH, I find Twitter useful for research leads -- such as the Atlantic
>>> article a tweep broadcast today about how the Internet almost fractured --
>>> or Zeynep et al's (@techsoc) discussion of social media and MENA
>>> revolutions.
>>> Barry Wellman
>>>
>>
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