Researching News Discussion on Twitter

Abstract Twitter has become a major instrument for the rapid dissemination and subsequent debate of news stories, and comprehensive methodologies for systematic research into news discussion on Twitter are beginning to emerge. This paper outlines innovative approaches for large-scale quantitative research into how Twitter is used to discuss and cover the news, focusing especially on #hashtags: brief identifiers which mark a tweet as taking part in an established discussion. Keywords: newssocial networking Twitter #hashtags Notes 1. Generally, it is possible for a user to follow any other Twitter user; however, users may set their accounts to “private”, in which case they will have to approve any follow requests. 2. One remaining limitation is that hashtagged tweets from accounts marked as “private” will not be included in the search results. 3. Hashtags are also used in other contexts—for example as ironic markers of one's mood (#tired) or to highlight key terms (#Australia)—but our focus in the following discussion is purely on topical hashtags. 4. Twitter has entered into an agreement with the US Library of Congress to make its full “firehose” feed available to the Library, for access by researchers after a six-month embargo (Raymond, Citation2010); however, the embargo means that research into current coverage and news discussion remains impossible, and modalities of access to the dataset at the Library are as yet unknown. 5. See http://your.twapperkeeper.com/. 6. Higher-resolution, colour versions of all figures presented in this paper are available online: Figure 1: http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/2010/11/24/election-2010-the-view-from-twitter/; Figure 2: http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/2011/08/12/twitter-and-the-royal-wedding-pt-1-something-processed/; Figure 3: http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/2011/07/12/emergency-management-conference/; Figure 4: http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/2011/07/12/emergency-management-conference/; Figure 5: http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/2010/11/24/election-2010-the-view-from-twitter/; Figure 6: http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/2010/11/24/election-2010-the-view-from-twitter/; Figure 7: http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/2010/11/24/election-2010-the-view-from-twitter/; Figure 8: http://www.mappingonlinepublics.net/2011/07/07/tweeting-at-the-tv-some-observations-on-gobacksbs. 7. We note that yourTwapperkeeper only captures manual retweets (“RT @user …”), not retweets made using Twitter's more recent “retweet button” functionality. This is not necessarily a drawback: because they can be edited before sending, manual retweets serve significantly more conversational functions than “button” retweets; for example, users will often retweet part of an earlier message in order to add their own, original commentary. “Button” retweets, on the other hand, constitute merely a verbatim passing-along of the original message, with retweeting users unable to include any additional comments with the retweeted message. While tracking the amount of button retweets for each message might provide an interesting additional dimension to the analysis, it does not have significant relevance to the analysis of actively discursive interaction.