PhD Blog (dot) Net

I’ve commented previously on how sites like Twitter provide researchers with explicit interactions and user relationships that lend themselves to network-based data mining methods and visual analytics. These help us understand frequencies and patterns of use up to a point, but fall short in indicating the complex, inconsistent and selective viewing behaviours and strategies that underpin how we actually engage with Twitter.

These are partly determined by how we access Twitter, and how we may adopt ‘filtering’ systems (within Twitter and third-party). But what I’m particularly interested in here is how we ‘scan’ or ‘skim read’ our Twitter timelines. When new users express concern about the apparent content overload, experienced users tend to reassure them by explaining they don’t have to ‘read everything’ and that they will ‘get used to’ scanning tweets. It’s fairly clear why we do this, but how?

Observational methods (remotely or through screen recordings) can provide limited data, but for a more accurate insight, eye-tracking technology can record how we actually ‘read’ sites like Twitter, as demonstrated here. Supplementary methods such as the think/talk-aloud protocols associated with usability testing, and follow-up memory tests might offer opportunities for triangulation.

I’m not experienced in these tools, or familiar with how they are being used in research, and I would question how much the ‘laboratory’ conditions in which these types of investigations are typically undertaken reflect everyday use. But it is interesting to speculate on the contribution they can make to our understanding of user engagement with Twitter. Given such an approach, the type of questions one could explore might include:

• How much consistency / variation in skim reading do we exhibit over different periods of engagement?
• Do we navigate tweets in a generally (reverse) chronological order or more randomly?
• How ‘far back’ do we check tweets since we last looked?
• What are our dominant focal points – specific users or specific content?
• How much do we focus on specific components – in particular URLs, hashtags?
• How important is the colour coding of these components?
• Do we focus more on specific types of tweets (e.g. those with links)?
• Do we notice specific words or terms (that are not hashtagged)?
• What about capital letters, symbols, exclamation marks, expletives etc?
• Do we primarily identify our followees by their user names or avatars?
• Are some (types of) avatars more instantly recognisable?
• How much does the unfamiliarity of original authors of formal retweets (not RTs) attract our attention?
• Do we take much notice of who retweets them?
• Are we more likely to ignore multiple tweets from excessive users?

An interesting blog post by Jane Davis on self-esteem got me thinking. Drawing on William James’s assertion that “self-esteem is a function of both our achievements and our aspirations” (Burke & Stets, 2009: 24), Jane proposes that the loose ties of an online community can provide more effective means of supporting self-esteem. I find a lot of the post-Granovetter literature on weak / strong ties tend to focus on social capital. What Jane is discussing here is probably more interesting:

“I consider two Twitter communities to which I contribute (#rheumchat and #phdchat) and also participants in my own research. Both communities share the facility to support the understanding of achievements and aspirations within and across the community and thus provide supportive social structures through ‘patterns of action.’ Such structures do not resolve the immediate dilemma or circumstance of the participant but work to support esteem through the modulation, understanding and recognition of stages of achievement – however small or large.”

I’m not familiar with #rheumchat, but I would suggest the type of Twitter ‘communities’ she mentions here facilitate relatively shallow engagement between participants. This is not being derogatory, but merely recognises the limitations of the socio-technological relationships that such platforms can reasonably support. I suggested in a previous post that the most important aspect of peer support in these types of hashtag communities might be found in the phatic, empathic and socio-affective forms of conversation.

Jane does not indicate in her post how she might be assessing self-esteem in her research, but language is clearly important here. In any Twitter community such as #phdchat, the genre of conversation is reduced to the level of the ‘soundbite,’ requiring that participants employ largely generic academic / professional cultural references, which when discussing achievements and aspirations can be seen as serving an important role in supporting (or potentially damaging) self-esteem.

That said, the relationship between any given individual participants in this type of community / network needs to seen as dynamic – in that the nature of familiarisation and trust can change over time – and potentially multi-contextual – i.e. also existing outside that particular environment. Even within the 140-characters limit of a tweet, these factors can have considerable influence on the type of language employed. Think about how familiar, honest, polite or critical we choose to be when addressing each other on Twitter.

Jane points to the potential vulnerability of relying solely on close ties, suggesting, “such closely aligned supporters may not see the bigger picture.” To me, these ‘closely-aligned supporters’ (which I take to include partners, supervisors, immediate colleagues, ‘critical friends’ etc.) have a more invested relationship with the individual and her/his work. That’s not to say they shouldn’t be sensitive to the needs of supporting self-esteem, but in the routine ‘mechanics’ of their working relationship, these can easily get overlooked.

Whilst browsing Twitter late last night, it suddenly occurred to me that the interface had reverted to it’s old design. A retweet indicated there was a temporary fault, and sure enough this morning everything was back to normal. It’s like when your shiny black digital widescreen TV breaks down, and you dig out the old yellowing, boxy analogue telly from the attic (“I knew it would come in handy.”) Timeframes in the retrograding of  technology are rapid in social media. My experience of this brief flirtation was a mix of slight disorientation, a twinge of nostalgia, and that self-satisfying smugness that comes with the illusion of technological progress.

Image: Moma Propoganda | MaxiMídia

This post is an early contribution to an exploratory exercise in collaborative writing following recent discussions with fellow Twitter users @jennifermjones, @martin_eve and @FlyGirlTwo. In discussing the activities associated with the recently established Twitter hashtag #phdchat and its emergent postgraduate student following, we hope to use our own online spaces to create an open dialogue for critical reflection that others (not least ‘phdchat-ters’ themselves) can contribute to and develop.

#phdchat is a themed, hour-long session held every Wednesday at 7.30pm UK time, with associated asynchronous chat through the rest of the week, and – at present – limited activity on other platforms (a wiki and a Facebook Group). For a more detailed overview, and an account of its brief history, see Martin’s excellent introductory post.

Many of the increasing number of studies into Twitter have adopted modes of enquiry based on largely quantitative and data mining methods, which provide very useful indicators of participation activity, frequency and interactions, often utilising easily accessible visual forms of dissemination. Microblogs like Twitter present researchers with explicit environments that lend themselves – perhaps too easily – to a network-based research paradigm that can reduce user relationships and interaction to nodes and clusters without adequately addressing the complexities that underpin such activities.

By critiquing such methodologies we can also problematize the over-emphasis on digital artefacts as a singular indicator of social media use. Whilst I realise active participation is fundamental to the web 2.0 rhetoric, we should recognise that the production and re-appropriation of digital artefacts do not necessarily represent the full picture of social media engagement and interaction. For example, I contributed to a recent weekly chat in between cooking tagliatelle and watching football on TV.

Several studies have attempted to develop more qualitative models for analysing tweets, including boyd, Golder et al.’s (2010) look into retweeting practices, whilst others (for example, Priem & Costello, 2010) adopt a mixed methods approach, supporting quantitative data with participant interviews. I’m sure there are other examples in the growing body of literature.

I encountered the difficulties in categorising Twitter use myself when, as part of my PhD pilot study, I attempted to develop a taxonomy of tweets based on individual participants’ use of Twitter in relation to their doctoral practices. Mutually inclusive categories were defined by:

• Type – e.g. open, reply, retweet. direct message etc.
• Orientation – e.g. crowdsourcing, notification, backchannel etc.
• Feature – e.g. (includes) RT, link, hashtag etc.

In addition, I examined relationships within participants’ Twitter networks (followers and followees) by:

• Location – to identify collocated and distributed research networks within and external to faculties and institutions
• Academic Discipline – to identify modes of ‘locating’ in the research field, enculturation and boundary crossing across disciplinary and interdisciplinary contexts
• Academic Hierarchy – to identify peer support and participation and recognition in the research field

I’m not suggesting that even modified versions of these imperfect models would be appropriate for examining #phdchat, but it is useful to consider how such approaches might contribute to an understanding of emergent practices.

Discernible themes in #phdchat are naturally influenced by the pre-determined topics of each of the weekly chats, though it is not uncommon for participants to go ‘off-piste’ in their discussions. Whilst recurring themes related to ‘doing a PhD’ are clearly evident – such as specific academic practices (literature review, writing up etc.), theories and methodologies, and use of technologies – we also need to recognise that many of the tweets indicate phatic, empathic and socio-affective forms of conversation. It may well be these elements of peer support that represent the real value of this growing community.

This is only a start, but it’s getting interesting…

References

boyd, D., Golder, S., & Lotan, G. (2010). Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter. Proceedings of HICSS-43. http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf

Priem, J. & Costello, K. L. (2010). How and why scholars cite on Twitter. Proceedings of ASIST 2010. http://bit.ly/eJnlb5

SmartMobs describes a report from the China Digital Times on the twitter mobbing of a virtual wall set up by KulturProjekte to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Using the twitter hashtag #FOTW, Chinese ‘netizens’ have bombarded the site with calls to end State censorship of the Web.

Which I wonder (should the latter happen) would have the greater historical significance; the fall of the Beriln Wall or that of the Great Firewall of China?

It’s several months now since I started using twitter. It’s usefulness as a research tool became increasingly apparent as my following and followers matured. For me, the tipping point was the introduction of the integrated tweet feature in delicious. Now, nearly all my new bookmarks are automatically twittered. Whilst my delicious is long established as an effective personal management resource, I have never really engaged with the ‘social-ness’ of social bookmarking. My attempts at using delicious networking facilities – and with it the potential to extend bookmark annotation to a participatory activity – have been largely unsuccessful. Twitter’s 140 word limit restricts any annotation (or indeed, critical discourse in general) to that of the soundbite – which is why blogging remains important – yet its value in broadcasting web links in a timely and socially constructive environment is a powerful process which delicious never really capitalised on.

* I am aware that this phrase (without the !) has been adopted as a name for several mashup tools, but you just can’t think up anything these days without someone getting there first.