1. Methods Question (Required)

Over the last few years Twitter feeds have become popular data sources for studying a wide range of social and cultural phenomena, from political activism and public opinion, to investor sentiment and stock market swings, to trends in popular culture and discourse. For this question, propose a research study that incorporates Twitter data as part of a mixed-methods design (i.e., one that uses a mix of quantitative and qualitative social science techniques, and/or critical/interpretive scholarship). Your research design must include:

• A well-formulated research question, problem or hypothesis for which Twitter feed data would be relevant or appropriate
• A brief review of essential literature that provides a background and rationale for the question you pose and your methodology
• A description of the specific data-gathering and -analysis procedures (including Twitter-related methods) that you will employ in the study to answer or address the research question
• A discussion of the strengths and limitations of the various elements of your mixed-methods design (that is, the different data sources, data gathering methods, and data analysis techniques, and their various qualities of reliabilty/validity, generalizability, etc.). Be sure to discuss the ways that the different techniques you choose for the study may “triangulate” with one another to offset or balance their various strengths and shortcomings.

I Restate the question
A. The abundance and popularity of social media messaging has created a rich source of data for investigations of social and cultural phenomena.

B. Twitter feeds, in particular, have been used in a variety of research fields to analyze human behavior and attitudes, including TKTK, TKTK, and TKTK.

C. Examples of research questions and how Twitter data addressed them

D. A timely research question that could benefit from the insights of discourse analysis of Twitter feeds concerns public perceptions of personal information privacy and intellectual property.

Another: discourse analysis of Twitter messages to assess public perceptions of hacktivist organization WikiLeaks Discourse analysis to determine whether the people who retweet information from Anonymous and/or Wikileaks

1. There are several elements comprising the public's attitudes toward intellectual property and privacy.

a. TKTK delineates the following:

i. TKTKTKTK

ii. TKTKTKTK

Definition: linked content

For this paper, I examine public attitudes toward intellectual property within the scope of attribution of content circulated through social media networks. My aim is to answer the following questions:

1. What is the frequency of attribution for linked content circulated through social media networks by American adults?
2. How does the practice of attribution for linked content in Twitter messages reflect the beliefs of American adults engaging in the network?

My approach: Constructionism

A metatheory for understanding knowledge formation and its social and power relationships. Practitioners of constructionism analyze human discourse (e.g., conversations and writings) to show how meanings and self-concepts are formed (see also “Constructivism” in this glossary; Chapter 7; Bates, 2005a; and Talja, Tuominen, & Savolainen, 2005).

How do tweets about corporate stock activity affect share price? Is this any different from whisper numbers?

Method

Discourse analysis to reveal ideologies

"systematic discourse analysis offers powerful methods to study the structures and functions of ‘underlying’ ideologies. The ideological polarization between ingroups and outgroups— a prominent feature of the structure of ideologies—may also be systematically studied at all levels of text and talk, e.g. by analysing how members of ingroups typically emphasize their own good deeds and properties and the bad ones of the outgroup, and mitigate or deny their own bad ones and the good ones of the outgroup."  Van Dijk on Ideology and discourse analysis, 2007

Discourse analysis to determine whether linked content is presented with or without attribution

Content analysis to compare retweeting behavior and survey of self-reported attitudes toward hacktivist-generated information among adults aged 18-69 who are actively disseminate information via Twitter.

analyze Twitter information flows during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings. Our information flows are drawn from two datasets of public tweets, each shared during a period of approximately one week. The first covers the Tunisian demonstrations from January 12–19, 2011; the second covers the Egyptian demonstrations from January 24–29, 2011. We analyzed both data sets to identify different types of users who posted to Twitter regularly, sorting them into what we call “key actor types,” e.g., MSM organizations, individual journalists, influential regional and global actors, and other participants who actively posted to Twitter on these two revolutions. We look at how each actor
produced and passed information over the networks of Twitter users. In each case—Tunisia and Egypt—we describe how information flowed across different actor types and discuss why we see certain patterns. We conclude by discussing the symbiotic relationship between news media and information sources.