[Air-L] twitter useless to study?

[Cornelius Puschmann]

I'm studying academic uses of Twitter (e.g. at conferences) and haven't
really encountered spam in that context. I think increasingly the question
is what specific kind of discourse or group of communicators you want to
study inside a social media channel like Twitter or FB, rather than taking
the fire hose approach.

Cornelius

On Mon, Mar 7, 2011 at 3:44 AM, S. Courtney Walton <scw at umail.ucsb.edu>wrote:

> I'm wrapping up a quantitative content analysis of Twitter, looking at
> levels of self-disclosure among professional and parent bloggers.
>
> Spam hasn't been an issue with the 300 public users in the study.
>
> On Fri, Mar 4, 2011 at 3:09 PM, Barry Wellman <wellman at chass.utoronto.ca
> >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
> >  _______________________________________________________________________
> >
> >  S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, FRSC               NetLab Director
> >  Department of Sociology                  725 Spadina Avenue, Room 388
> >  University of Toronto   Toronto Canada M5S 2J4   twitter:barrywellman
> >  http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~wellman             fax:+1-416-978-3963
> >  Updating history:      http://chass.utoronto.ca/oldnew/cybertimes.php
> >  _______________________________________________________________________
> >
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>
>
> --
> Best Regards,
>
> S. Courtney Walton
> scw at umail.ucsb.edu
>
> MA/PhD Student
> Department of Communication
> 4309 Social Sciences & Media Studies Bldg
> University of California, Santa Barbara
> 93106
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-- 
Dr. Cornelius Puschmann, M.A.

Department for English Language and Linguistics
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf
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Universitätsstrasse 1
40225 Düsseldorf
Germany

+49 211 81 15927 (office)

Nachwuchsforschergruppe "Wissenschaft und Internet" /
Junior Researchers Group "Science and the Internet"
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