AoIR 2012

New Methodologies for Capturing and Working with Publicly Available Twitter Data

Axel Bruns

• 21 Oct. 2012 – Panel "Digital Data – Lost, Found, and Made" at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Salford

New Methodologies for Capturing and Working with Publicly Available Twitter Data from Axel Bruns

The vast majority of objects, events, and artifacts that might provide insight into human practices of communication – across cultures and historical time – are lost forever. In contemporary settings, only few instances and aspects of either media production or media use are documented. Over the course of history, as well, potential sources of evidence have gone missing, intentionally or not, despite the continued efforts of historians and other scholars to later retrieve or reconstruct them.

In comparison, communication via the internet and other digital technologies is, to some degree, recording itself – these data can be ‘found.' The data transmitted are associated with meta-data – data about data that are a source of information in their own right, beyond the information that is ‘sent' and ‘received.' Meta-information situates the information that is exchanged in communication in relation to its contexts – the source of the information, its connections with other items, their trajectories across sites and servers, the actual users of the information, who, perhaps, add their own meta-information. At the same time, other kinds of data must be ‘made' in order to account for the place of digital media in social interaction and change on a global scale. In one sense, the evidence is just there – to be found. In another sense, it mostly has to be remade and processed to account for radically distributed and contextualized practices of communication.

The present cultural environment of digital technologies provides a unique opportunity to reconsider the traditional distinction between data that, respectively, are found and made. Presenting important ethical and political considerations, self-documenting media also raise fundamental methodological and theoretical issues for quantitative as well as qualitative research. This roundtable brings together key contributors to the first decade of internet research to address these issues.

In line with the conference theme, the roundtable will facilitate a dialogue about the internet both as a technology of communication and as a technology of research: how can research document and assess the nature and quality of internet communication with reference to available data – found and made? As such, the roundtable also invites reflection on research as itself a form of communication and participation in the field of inquiry. We both find and make our objects of analysis.

The contributors to the roundtable represent the breadth of the field: qualitative and quantitative methodologies, junior and senior scholars, and research traditions reflecting different regions of the world. They will each offer position statements, based on their own work and with reference to current and future prospects for research combining data that are found and made.