Four New Chapters on the Challenges of Doing Twitter Research

One more post before I head home from the AoIR 2015 conference in Phoenix: during the conference, I also received my author’s copy of Hashtag Publics, an excellent new collection edited by Nathan Rambukkana. In this collection, Jean Burgess and I published an updated version of our paper from the ECPR conference in Reykjavík, which conceptualises (some) hashtag communities as ad hoc publics – and Theresa Sauter and I also have a chapter in the book that explores the #auspol hashtag for Australian politics.

Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess. “Twitter Hashtags from Ad Hoc to Calculated Publics.” In Hashtag Publics: The Power and Politics of Discursive Networks, ed. Nathan Rambukkana. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. 13-28.

Theresa Sauter and Axel Bruns. “#auspol: The Hashtag as Community, Event, and Material Object for Engaging with Australian Politics.” In Hashtag Publics: The Power and Politics of Discursive Networks, ed. Nathan Rambukkana. New York: Peter Lang, 2015. 47-60.

In addition to Hashtag Publics, I’ve also had word that another book that Jean and I have contributed to is now out: Digital Methods for Social Science, edited by Helene Snee, Christine Hine, Yvette Morey, Steven Roberts,  and Hayley Watson. Here, we explore the difficulties of doing research in a restrictive and changing space such as Twitter:

Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess. “Methodological Innovation in Precarious Spaces: The Case of Twitter.” In Digital Methods for Social Science: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Research Innovation, eds. Helene Snee, Christine Hine, Yvette Morey, Steven Roberts, and Hayley Watson. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

And as you would have seen from the liveblogging, at the conference itself we also had a panel built around the Compromised Data collection edited by Greg Elmer, Ganaele Langlois, and Joanna Redden. Jean and I have another chapter in there which could be seen as a companion piece to the Digital Methods contribution – it works through the different phases of API access politics that we have seen with Twitter to date:

Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. “Easy Data, Hard Data: The Politics and Pragmatics of Twitter Research after the Computational Turn.” In Ganaele Langlois, Joanna Redden, and Greg Elmer, eds., Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 93-111.