Approaches to Analyzing Scientific

Communication on Twitter A project of the researchers group „Science and the Internet“

Katrin Weller & Cornelius Puschmann

Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf

The World According to Twitter workshop.

Brisbane, Australia. June 28, 2011.

Slides are online: http://www.slideshare.net/katrinweller

Background: Science and the Internet

http://nfgwin.uni-duesseldorf.de/en/node

NFGWIN

6 projects

8 persons

5 disciplines

1 overall topic

Background: Science and the Internet

The projects

Digital genres of publication

Educational beliefs Law and scientific

internet usage

Change of the “Publication” concept

Citations in Web 2.0 3D environments

Background: Science and the Internet

Current activities

Guest lectures

Doctoral class

Courses for academic staff

Media trainings

September 2012, Düsseldorf

Conference

Scientific Twitter usage

Work across subprojects

Background: Science and the Internet

Current activities

HHU-QUT exchange

Scientific Microblogging?

How can scientific tweets be identified?

Based on content

Based on persons

Based on formats

Analyzing Conference Tweets

• Selection of conferences

• Collection of tweets based on conference hashtags

Data Collection

• Time series

• Most active users

• User-networks

Automatic Analysis

• Categorization of tweet contents

• Key question: Are tweets dealing with the scientific topics of a conference?

Manual Analysis

• URLs in tweets („external citations“)

• Retweets („internal citations“) Citation Analysis

Data Collection

Automatic Analysis

Time Series: #mla09

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User Network based on RTs: #mla09

Retweet-Networks over Time

Data from Digital Humanities Conference 2010 (7-10 July 2010), Source:: Puschmann, C., Weller, K., & Dröge, E. (2011). Studying Twitter

conversations as (dynamic) graphs: visualization and structural comparison. Presented at General Online Research, 14-16 March 2011, Düsseldorf, Germany. Retrieved from http://ynada.com/posters/gor11.pdf.

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Manual Analysis

Categorization Scheme for Tweet Contents

1. Level: Content

1.1 Related to scientific topics of conference [YES]

1.2 Not related to scientific topics of conference [NO]

1.3 undefined [NA]

2. Level: Purpose

2.1 Communication with others [COM]

2.2 Conference-related tweets [CONF]

2.3 Self-referential tweets [ME]

2.4 Media-sharing [URL]

2.5 undefined [NA]

RTs excluded

Tweet Contents

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Tweet Contents

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Citation Analysis on Twitter

Citations and References

• Document A cites Document B = A includes a reference to B.

• There is an information flow from B to A.

• Document B receives a citation (and thus reputation).

Citing

Document A Cited

Document B

Reputation

Information

Reference: see

Document B.

„Everything will

be allright!“

As pointed out by

B, everything will

be allright.

Citations and References on Twitter?

External and Internal Citations

Overlap of External and Internal Citations

Overlap of External and Internal Citations

What is Highly Cited?

What is Highly Cited?

URL Categories: #www2010

URL Categories: #mla09

Future Work

Inclusion of additional conferences, comparision of disciplines

More detailed analysis of datasets based on people

Identification of „user types“

Longitudinal study: Usage patterns over time

Greetings from Düsseldorf!

#nfgwin #iwhhu

@knuurps

Evelyn Dröge

@free5pirit

Julia Verbina

@ParrPar

Parinaz Maghferat

Dr. Katrin Weller Dr. Cornelius Puschmann Dept. of Information Science Dept. of English Language and Linguistics

Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf

Universitätsstr. 1, Geb. 23.21.04.68, Universitätsstr. 1, Geb. 23.11.01.21

D-40225 Düsseldorf D-40225 Düsseldorf

E-Mail: weller@uni-duesseldorf.de E-Mail: cornelius.puschmann@uni-

duesseldorf.de

Twitter: @kwelle Twitter: @coffee001

Acknowledgements:

Further Reading

• Weller, K., & Puschmann, P. (2011, in press). Twitter for Scientific Communication: How Can

Citations/References be Identified and Measured? To appear in: Proceedings of the Poster

Session at the Web Science Conference 2011, Koblenz, Germany.

Preprint: http://www.websci11.org/fileadmin/websci/Posters/153_paper.pdf

• Weller, K., Dröge, E., & Puschmann, C. (2011). Citation Analysis in Twitter: Approaches for

Defining and Measuring Information Flows within Tweets during Scientific Conferences. In

Matthew Rowe, Milan Stankovic, Aba-Sah Dadzie, & Mariann Hardey (Eds.), Making Sense of

Microposts (#MSM2011), Workshop at Extended Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2011), Crete,

Greece (pp. 1-12). CEUR Workshop Proceedings Vol. 718. http://sunsite.informatik.rwth-

aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-718/

• Puschmann, C., Weller, K., & Dröge, E. (2011). Studying Twitter conversations as (dynamic)

graphs: Visualization and structural comparison. Poster presented at General Online Research

(GOR 11), 14-16 March 2011, Düsseldorf, Germany. Retrieved from

http://ynada.com/posters/gor11.pdf.

• Dröge, E., Maghferat, P., Puschmann, C., Verbina, J., & Weller, K. (2011). Konferenz-Tweets. Ein

Ansatz zur Analyse der Twitter-Kommunikation bei wissenschaftlichen Konferenzen. In Joachim

Griesbaum, Thomas Mandl, Christa Womser-Hacker (Eds.), Information und Wissen: global, sozial

und frei? Proceedings des 12. Internationalen Symposiums für Informationswissenchaft (pp. 98-

110). Boizenburg: VWH.

Selected References

• Boyd, D., Golder, S., Lotan, G.: Tweet, tweet, retweet: Conversational aspects of

retweeting on Twitter. In R. H. Sprague (Ed.), Proceedings of the 43rd Conference on

System Sciences (HICSS 10), Honolulu, Hawaii, USA. Piscataway, NJ: IEEE (2010)

• Ebner, M., & Reinhardt, W. (2009). Social networking in scientific conferences: Twitter

as tool for strengthen a scientific community. In U. Cress; V. Dimitrova, & M. Specht

(Eds.), Learning in the Synergy of Multiple Disciplines.4th European Conference on

Technology Enhanced Learning, EC-TEL 2009 Nice, France. Berlin: Springer.

• Letierce, J., Passant, A., Decker, S., & Breslin, J. G. (2010). Understanding how Twitter

is used to spread scientific messages. In Proceedings of the Web Science Conference

(WebSci10): Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, Raleigh, NC, USA.

• Priem, J., & Costello, K. L. (2010). How and why scholars cite on Twitter. In C.

Marshall; E. Toms, & A. Grove (Eds.), Proceedings of the 73rd ASIS&T Annual Meeting

on Navigating Streams in an Information Ecosystem, Pittsburgh, PA, USA (pp. Article

No. 75). New York, NY: ACM.

• Ross, C., Terras, M., Warwick, C., & Welsh, A. (2011). Enabled backchannel:

Conference Twitter use by digital humanists. Journal of Documentation, 67(2), 214–

237.

Sources for images

Page 3:

Second Life: http://www.beekeepergroup.com/is-second-life-relevant/

“Blog” keyboard: http://www.timelesswebs.com/make-money-blog-money-blog/

Wikipedia citations: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brisbane

Page 4 (media trainings), pages 6, 9, 15, 19, 29: Microsoft ClipArt.

Photos from Düsseldorf / Brisbane (pages 4,5, 30) by Katrin Weller.