SM&S 2019

The Expert in the Debate: Mapping Scholarly Contributions to the 2018 Australia Day Debate across Social Media

Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, and Kim Osman

• 21 July 2019 – Social Media & Society conference, Toronto

Extended Abstract

Background

This WIP paper seeks to explore how scholarly contributions (as a proxy for expert, trusted opinions) to popular debates are shared and engaged with via social media. With a focus on the mistrust of information circulating on social media platforms at the same time as there is a need for scholars to demonstrate public engagement with their work, scholars are in a unique position to inform mainstream debates. Platforms like Twitter and The Conversation, a key amplifier platform for scholarly voices, enable experts to contribute to discussions on contested topics. In this WIP paper we particularly focus on the roles that these scholarly contributions (treated as ‘media objects’) play in issue networks, as part of the wider digital media and news environment. It takes as its case study the debates around Australia Day in 2018, historically a site of significant public contestation in both formal and informal (popular) communication.

The current WIP therefore seeks to develop and explore methods for investigating how academic content that is pitched at a general readership – that is content that is in mainstream media or created specifically for amplifier platforms like The Conversation – is discussed by the public. This kind of public engagement is important as academic research and scholarly contributions to knowledge can work to promote the role of the expert in public discourse, “which, in times of growing doubt about academic authority, is incredibly important” (Fecher 2017).

Objective

Working with a range of social media sources and analytics from The Conversation itself, our objectives are to:

1. Map the overall issue networks associated with the Australia Day debate, across social media and mainstream media platforms.
2. Identify the articles written by scholars and published in The Conversation that resonate the most across these networks; relative to other media sources and voices, and with respect to specific platforms.
3. Describe how and when scholarly contributions ‘cross over’ different parts of (multi)issue networks and hence stakeholder communities, participating in ‘hybrid forums’ (Burgess, Galloway & Sauter, 2015).
4. Use the findings to suggest how scholarly engagement and impact can be more meaningfully measured.

Methods

The WIP focuses specifically on the use of the multiplatform issue mapping approach (Marres & Moats, 2015; Burgess et al., 2015; Burgess & Matamoros-Fernández, 2016), which is centred around but extends well beyond social media content and sources, and enables the analysis of how issue publics engage in public conversation around sites of public controversy and uncertainty.

We drew on a number of interrelated data sources, centred around Twitter and analyse public communication patterns in these datasets for the period from 9 to 31 January 2018. Our sources of Twitter data for this period are two-fold. First, we drew on data from the Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX), a long-term project to track the circulation of links to Australian news sites on Twitter (Bruns 2017). Second, we captured tweets containing a number of topical keywords and hashtags that we anticipated to be common in tweets discussing Australia Day and related matters; for this, we used the industry-standard Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit (TCAT), produced by the University of Amsterdam’s Digital Methods Initiative (Borra & Rieder 2014). In addition to these sources of Twitter data, finally, we also drew on internal data from The Conversation, one of the major international platforms that serve to amplify the impact of scholarly contributions in public debate, for further evidence of engagement with the stories relating to Australia Day that it had published.

Results

We identified several major clusters in the in the interaction network developed from the TCAT keyword and hashtag dataset and examined the extent to which scholarly contributions were shared in each of these (see Fig. 1 below). We explored the different level of engagement with scholarly contributions to the public debate and the different topical focus that can be observed in such engagement. The results from this exercise reveal a considerably divergent approach to the Australia Day issue, which we explain as resulting from the differing ideological perspectives that are predominant in the different interaction clusters. The politics, Indigenous, far right, and conservative clusters each engage most strongly with articles that support their perspective on the debate; some articles that forcefully express a distinct perspective are shared almost exclusively by one or another of the clusters, but not across multiple diverging ideologies. A number of articles do appear prominently in several of the clusters, however; thus, although they may be read differently by each group, these scholarly contributions do manage to carve out a presence in the public debate across ideological positions.

Fig. 1: network map of account interactions within the TCAT keyword and hashtag dataset.

Future Work

The remaining research will further examine the kinds of scholarly contributions that meaningfully interact with intersecting issue publics, or play a role in ‘hybrid forums’ (Callon, Lascoumes & Barthe, 2009) of diverse stakeholders and viewpoints. As part of a large-scale collaborative research project, future work will also include comparing the role of sites like The Conversation and its user-led and Creative Commons licensed model with other social and mainstream media sites for establishing trust in expert views and scholarly voices, as initial findings suggest articles from popular press sites are more frequently shared among conservative and far right Twitter users. With access to internal The Conversation metrics, we intend to explore how, when and where articles are republished by mainstream media sites along with how they are shared on social media beyond Twitter.

References

Borra, E., & Rieder, B. (2014). Programmed Method: Developing a Toolset for Capturing and Analyzing Tweets. Aslib Journal of Information Management, 66(3), 262–278. https://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-09-2013-0094

Bruns, A. (2017). Making Audience Engagement Visible: Publics for Journalism on Social Media Platforms. In B. Franklin & S. A. Eldridge II (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies (pp. 325–334). London: Routledge.

Burgess, J., Galloway, A.  & Sauter, T. (2015). Hashtag as Hybrid Forum. In N. Rambukkana (Ed.) Hashtag Publics. New York: Peter Lang.

Burgess, J. & Matamoros-Fernandez, A. (2016). Mapping sociocultural controversies across digital media platforms: One week of #gamergate on Twitter, YouTube, and Tumblr. Communication Research and Practice, 2(1), 79-96.

Callon, M., Lascoumes, P. & Barthe, Y. (2009). Acting in an uncertain world. Cambridge: Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

Fecher, Benedikt. (2017). Academic impact outside of academia. Retrieved from https://www.hiig.de/en/impact-school-2017-academic-impact/, 28 December, 2017.

Marres, N., & Moats, D. (2015). Mapping controversies with social media: The case for symmetry. Social Media + Society, 1(2).