Hey, I agree that filtering Twitter datasets by hashtags or other means removes a lot of junk, spam, etc. (unless you are looking at junk that is). A key event like the #iranelection, for instance, provides for a pretty focused collection particularly when compared to a random sample of the public timeline. It is disappointing then that Twitter themselves are becoming the major obstruction, thanks to their recent and explicit commercial intent. Andrew _________________________________________________________________ http://andrew-long.name | Department of Information Science | School of Business University of Otago | NZ | +64 3 479 8319 | mailto:andrew.long@otago.ac.nz ________________________________________ From: Jeffrey Keefer [j.keefer@lancaster.ac.uk] Sent: Sunday, 6 March 2011 12:45 To: AoIR-L Aoir Subject: Re: [Air-L] twitter useless to study? I agree that Twitter has an increasing amount of spam accounts, though my research has recently focused around the use of hash tags, and I have not seen much spam there yet. Alas, once that happens, then I can envision a decrease in researchability (or even use) of Twitter. Regardless, I do think that Twitter's recent restrictions of accessing some of the very things that Google itself indexes is problematic. ----- Jeffrey Keefer j.keefer@lancaster.ac.uk Blog: http://silenceandvoice.com Twitter: http://twitter.com/JeffreyKeefer Website: http://www.jeffreykeefer.com On Mar 4, 2011, at 9:56 PM, D.Yvette Wohn wrote:
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@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
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/
_______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/