Social Media and Society 2019, Toronto: Mapping scholarly contributions to the 2018 Australia Day debate across social media

1. @qutdmrc
Social Media & Society, Toronto, 21 July 2019 | @kimosman
Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess & Kim Osman
The expert in the debate:
Mapping scholarly contributions to the 2018 Australia Day
debate across social media

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

3. @qutdmrc
● Engagement & Impact Assessment
Trial
● Impact beyond academic and industry
circles (we are tax-payer funded!)
● Visibility of scholars in public debate
● Take-up in public policy making at all
levels of government
● Trusted Voices and Opinions
Public Value of Research
@qutdmrc

4. Approach

5. @qutdmrc
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.
● WIP as part of a larger project

6. ‘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.’

7. @qutdmrc
Australia Day 2018
● Historically contested
● Involved multiple
sociocultural and political
elements

8. @qutdmrc
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
perhaps even Wikipedia.

9. @qutdmrc
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

10. @qutdmrc
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 articles contained a scholarly
contribution.

11. @qutdmrc
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

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

13. @qutdmrc

14. Discussion

15. @qutdmrc
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
● Take overarching views of the subject – these were shared more
widely than narrow partisan articles
● Scholars working in contentious areas need to perform their expert
oversight of issues in order to underpin the authority of their positions
on them.

16. @qutdmrc
Trusted opinions, evidence-based messages
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.”

17. @qutdmrc
Next steps
● More experimentation and comparative work
● Extending from sociocultural to environmental and scientific
controversies.
● Comparative studies with Canada; #auspol and #elxn43
● Exploring other platforms like YouTube and Reddit may be fruitful for the
study of knowledge controversies.
● Use the findings to suggest how scholarly engagement and impact can be
more meaningfully measured.
● How can universities support scholars to engage in public debates?

18. @qutdmrc
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

19. Thank you!
@kimosman
@qutdmrc