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Mapping a Twitter scholarly communication network: a case of the association of internet researchers’ conference

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Abstract

This paper investigates how scholars in the digital humanities use Twitter for informal scholarly communication. In particular, the paper observes the hosting of an annual conference over a number of years by one association in order to see whether there was a change in the network configuration structure, the influential scholars in the network, the information sources, and the tweet contents. Annual conferences held by the Association of Internet Researchers over 3 years are used for data collection. According to our result, while the Twitter communication network developed into a bigger network, the basic form of the network configuration remained stable as a Tight Crowd structure and the core influential people were not much changed. Analyses on information source and content found topic changes in each year but consistency in the kind of information source and content.

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Notes

  1. The AoIR changed its hashtag identifier and announced it would use #AoIR2016 instead of #IR17 as the official hashtag for the AoIR2016 conference on the AoIR website and via Twitter.

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Funding

This work was supported by a 2016 Yeungnam University Research Grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Media and Communication, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan, South Korea

    Mi Kyung Lee

  2. Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA

    Ho Young Yoon

  3. Social Media Research Foundation, Belmont, CA, USA

    Marc Smith

  4. Department of Educational Theory and Practice, University at Albany, SUNY, Albany, NY, USA

    Hye Jin Park

  5. Department of Media and Communication, Interdisciplinary Program of Digital Convergence Business, and Director of Cyber Emotions Research Institute, Yeungnam University, Gyeongsan, South Korea

    Han Woo Park

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  1. Mi Kyung Lee
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  2. Ho Young Yoon
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  3. Marc Smith
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  4. Hye Jin Park
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  5. Han Woo Park
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Correspondence to Han Woo Park.

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Lee, M.K., Yoon, H.Y., Smith, M. et al. Mapping a Twitter scholarly communication network: a case of the association of internet researchers’ conference. Scientometrics 112, 767–797 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11192-017-2413-z

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