[Air-L] twitter useless to study?

[Deller, Ruth A]

Doesn't everyone follow Barry Wellman AND Lady Gaga?  That just means you're normal!

I don't see much spam on Twitter at all - I mean, there are the spam accounts that follow you but I never see any actual spam because I don't follow back. It comes up sometimes when you search for a key word, but it's not something I see a lot - I guess it depends how you are monitoring Twitter and what search terms you're using, but compared to my home email where 2/3 of the mail is spam, Twitter is relatively quiet.

The denial of large data sets is a curious one given how big they were not that long ago on the Library of Congress having a Twitter archive.  I can't see how enforceable it's going to be, either.

Ruth

________________________________________
From: air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org [air-l-bounces at listserv.aoir.org] On Behalf Of D.Yvette Wohn [yvettewohn at gmail.com]
Sent: 05 March 2011 02:56
To: live
Cc: AoIR-L Aoir
Subject: Re: [Air-L] twitter useless to study?

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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