Framing the Pistorius Case on Twitter

The second presenter in our AoIR 2013 celebrity crisis panel is Ana Vimieiro, whose focus is on the crisis around Oscar Pistorius following the death of his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. Ana's approach in this is to use frame analysis to explore how the crisis is being conceptualised by the users discussing it on Twitter.

There are various approaches to frame analysis: holistic variable coding, a textual focus on terms and expressions (which ultimately focusses on topics more than frames), and data reduction techniques which draw on clustering approaches. Ana is employing the latter model, coding the text for less subjective categories including sources, causes, solutions, consequences, metaphors, slogans, examples, and moral judgments.

In the first place, Ana developed a manual coding approach, and then constructed a model for each variable to be coded. Automated coding was also performed at this point, and compared to the manual coding in order to ensure the reliability of the automatic coding.

Ana collected some 1.5 million tweets containing the keyword 'Pistorius' in the two weeks after the death, with a smaller sample of 800,000 unique tweets being used for the analysis. Several frames emerged from this:

• a satirical frame, which made sarcastic jokes about the case (often involving comedians, and commenting on Pistorius's disability),
• an episodic media frame (in which only the facts are reported, and no blame is attributed to Pistorius or other persons),
• an episodic journalistic frame (showcasing journalists' live-tweeting about the story, especially while covering the bail hearing),
• a personal frame (especially during the bail hearing, which focusses on Pistorius's personality and personal history),
• and a social frame (which puts the case in the context of issues with violence against women and with the level of gun crime in South Adrica, and examines the performance of the police).

The satirical frame is generally strongest, while the personal frame grows important especially around the bail hearing. But this remains work in progress, and further detailed analysis of the patterns in the data as well as further development of the frames will still need to be performed.