This document discusses a study analyzing how scholarly contributions influence public debate. It examines articles from The Conversation and other platforms discussing Australia Day between January 9-31, 2018. The study used data from the Australian Twitter News Index and Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit to map how these articles engaged audiences and spread across platforms. It found that articles containing scholarly contributions were shared more widely than other content, though some were shared more by conservative/far-right users. The study suggests scholars should engage more on hybrid forums to underpin their expertise and guide debates on contested issues.

1. @qutdmrc
ANZCA, Canberra, July 3-5 2019
Kim Osman, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess & Stuart Cunningham
communication on ‘amplifier’
platforms

2. Amplifying Public Value: Scholarly
Contributions’ Impact on Public
Debate

3. What are the stories
scholars tell?

4. @qutdmrc
● Engagement & Impact Assessment
Trial
● Impact beyond academic and industry
circles
● Visibility of scholars in public debate
● Take-up in public policy making at all
levels of government
● Media take-up of research and public
presence of scholars
Public Value of Research
@qutdmrc

5. ‘I don’t believe in all honesty that academia in terms of the current model
has any influence on practice at all.
Because I don’t think the people really bother reading our papers and
when they do it’s great, but we produce a massive piece of work and put it
into a couple of articles and the publish them academically. You’re
missing out on a real-world audience.
So I automatically go to The Conversation as an outlet for publishing or
at least alerting people outside of the academy.’

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Australia Day 2018
● Historically contested
● Involved multiple cultural
and political elements

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Key terms
● ‘Scholarly contributions’ refers to media items authored by or
substantially citing the work of academics, normally working within
universities.
● ‘Amplifier platforms’ are those digital media sites specifically designed
to translate and publicly disseminate these scholarly contributions to a
general audience – sites like The Conversation, Medium.com, and
Wikipedia.

8. Approach

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Issue Mapping
● Multiplatform issue mapping approach and method (Marres & Moats,
2015; Burgess et al., 2015; Burgess & Matamoros-Fernández, 2016).
This method is designed to enable the observation and analysis of
public engagement with controversies - that is, topics of shared
concern marked by uncertainty or contestation - through social media
data analysis, across media channels and platforms.

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Data Collection
Twitter discussions across relevant
hashtags and keywords
● Australian Twitter News Index (Bruns
2017)
● Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolkit
TCAT (Borra & Rieder, 2014)
● The Conversation access,
republication, and sharing data
● Timeframe
● 9-31 January 2018

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ATNIX
● 87,423 unique Australian news articles, which were shared on
Twitter a total of 791,292 times.
● 1,257 distinct article URLs shared more than 100 times
● 109 coded as relevant to Australia Day
● 16 highly shared shared articles contained a scholarly
contribution.

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TCAT
● 760,585 tweets
● 375,549 unique Twitter accounts
Median 1 tweet per account signaling a long tail of participation
Identified:
● 30 articles containing a scholarly contribution
● 17 The Conversation articles
● 3 IndigenousX articles
● 10 mainstream media articles

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interaction network, 9-31 Jan. 2018
retweets = red; @mentions = blue

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15. Discussion

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Engaging with Hybrid Forums
● Many overlapping publics (Callon, Lascoumes & Barthe, 2009)
● Use mainstream media
● These articles were shared more among conservative and far right
users
● Overarching views of the subject – rather, than narrow partisan takes
were shared more widely
● Scholars working in contentious areas need to perform their expert
oversight of issues in order to underpin the authority of their positions
on them.

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A last word
Digital and social media have grown exponentially to become highly
influential spheres of the public communication - increasingly crowded
and contested, and increasingly in need of scholarly engagement.
“I don't know if people who don't have clinician backgrounds, whether
they feel differently. But it’s really important to be communicating to the
public evidence-based messages.”

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Next steps
● More experimentation and comparative work
● Extending to sociocultural to environmental and scientific
controversies.
● Exploring other platforms like YouTube and Reddit may be fruitful for
the study of knowledge controversies in these disciplines.
● How can universities support scholars to engage in public debates?

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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 (pp. 61-76). New York: Peter Lang.
Burgess, J. & Matamoros-Fernández, 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. https://doi.org/10.1080/22041451.2016.1155338
Callon, M., Lascoumes, P. & Barthe, Y. (2009). Acting in an uncertain world. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Marres, N., & Moats, D. (2015). Mapping controversies with social media: The case for symmetry.
Social Media + Society, 1(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305115604176
Image Credits:
By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=59817309
Par Twitter (Doug Bowman, DA). — Twitter brand, marque déposée,
https://fr.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6348438

20. Thank you!
@qutdmrc
@kimosman