Now Out: Twitter and Society

I am delighted to report the culmination of a very intensive, highly collaborative project: our new book Twitter and Society, edited by Katrin Weller, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, Cornelius Puschmann, and me, was launched at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Denver a few days ago and is now available from Amazon and the Peter Lang Website. I’m very pleased that we managed to get the first copies of the book printed in time for the conference, to be able to hand them to the many of our contributors who were present at AoIR 2013.

The book is a 450-page anthology of the very best of current Twitter research, providing a comprehensive overview of research methods, concepts, challenges, and applications. It features some 31 chapters, a foreword by the University of Amsterdam’s Richard Rogers – and we’re particularly proud to have been able to use the painting Die Zwitschermaschine (The Twittering Machine) by Paul Klee as the book cover. Many, many thanks to our 45 contributors for their fabulous contributions. A full list of chapters is below – and here’s a group photo from the launch at AoIR 2013. You can also follow further updates about the book at @twitsocbook!

Left to right: back row – Michael Zimmer, Anders Larsson, Tim Highfield, Axel Maireder, Christian Nuernbergk, Mark Dang-Anh, and Rowan Wilken; from row – Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Katrin Weller, Alice Marwick, Nancy Baym, and Alex Halavais

Table of Contents

Foreword: Debanalising Twitter: The Transformation of an Object of Study
Richard Rogers

Twitter and Society: An Introduction
Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, & Cornelius Puschmann

Part I: Concepts and Methods

CONCEPTS

1 Twitter and the Rise of Personal Publics
Jan-Hinrik Schmidt

2 Structural Layers of Communication on Twitter
Axel Bruns & Hallvard Moe

3 Structure of Twitter: Social and Technical
Alexander Halavais

4 The Politics of Twitter Data
Cornelius Puschmann & Jean Burgess

METHODS

5 Data Collection on Twitter
Devin Gaffney & Cornelius Puschmann

6 Metrics for Understanding Communication on Twitter
Axel Bruns & Stefan Stieglitz

7 Sentiment Analysis and Time Series with Twitter
Mike Thelwall

8 Computer-Assisted Content Analysis of Twitter Data
Jessica Einspänner, Mark Dang-Anh, & Caja Thimm

9 Ethnographic and Qualitative Research on Twitter
Alice E. Marwick

10 Legal Questions of Twitter Research
Michael Beurskens

Part II: Perspectives and Practices

PERSPECTIVES

11 From #FollowFriday to YOLO: Exploring the Cultural Salience of Twitter Memes
Alex Leavitt

12 Twitter and Geographical Location
Rowan Wilken

13 Privacy on Twitter, Twitter on Privacy
Michael Zimmer & Nicholas Proferes

14 Automated Twitter Accounts
Miranda Mowbray

15 Information Retrieval for Twitter Data
Ke Tao, Claudia Hauff, Fabian Abel, & Geert-Jan Houben

16 Documenting Contemporary Society by Preserving Relevant Information from Twitter
Thomas Risse, Wim Peters, Pierre Senellart, & Diana Maynard

PRACTICES

Popular Culture

17 The Perils and Pleasures of Tweeting with Fans
Nancy Baym

18 Tweeting about the Telly: Live TV, Audiences, and Social Media
Stephen Harrington

19 Following the Yellow Jersey: Tweeting the Tour de France
Tim Highfield

20 Twitter and Sports: Football Fandom in Emerging and Established Markets
Axel Bruns, Katrin Weller, & Stephen Harrington

Brand Communication

21 Public Enterprise-Related Communication and Its Impact on Social Media Issue Management
Stefan Stieglitz & Nina Krüger

22 Twitter, Brands, and User Engagement
Tanya Nitins & Jean Burgess

Politics and Activism

23 Political Discourses on Twitter: Networking Topics, Objects, and People
Axel Maireder & Julian Ausserhofer

24 Twitter in Politics and Elections: Insights from Scandinavia
Anders Olof Larsson & Hallvard Moe

25 The Gift of the Gab: Retweet Cartels and Gift Economies on Twitter
Johannes Paßmann, Thomas Boeschoten, & Mirko Tobias Schäfer

Journalism

26 The Use of Twitter by Professional Journalists: Results of a Newsroom Survey in Germany
Christoph Neuberger, Hanna Jo vom Hofe, & Christian Nuernbergk

27 Twitter as an Ambient News Network
Alfred Hermida

Crisis Communication

28 Crisis Communication in Natural Disasters
Axel Bruns & Jean Burgess

29 Twitpic-ing the Riots: Analysing Images Shared on Twitter during the 2011 U.K. Riots
Farida Vis, Simon Faulkner, Katy Parry, Yana Manyukhina, & Lisa Evans

Twitter in Academia

30 Twitter in Scholarly Communication
Merja Mahrt, Katrin Weller, & Isabella Peters

31 How Useful Is Twitter for Learning in Massive Communities? An Analysis of Two MOOCs
Timo van Treeck & Martin Ebner

Epilogue: Why Study Twitter?
Cornelius Puschmann, Axel Bruns, Merja Mahrt, Katrin Weller, and Jean Burgess