Researching with Twitter timeline data: A demonstration via "everyday" socio-political talk around welfare provision. Issue 1 (March 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Brooker, Phillip; Barnett, Julie; Vines, John; Lawson, Shaun; Feltwell, Tom; Long, Kiel; Wood, Gavin
• Is Part Of: Big data & society. Volume 5:Issue 1(2018)
• Publication Date: 2018-03
• Subjects: Social media analytics -- digital methods -- digital ethnography -- narrative analysis -- socio-political issues -- social welfare; Big data -- Social aspects -- Periodicals; Social sciences -- Research -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Social sciences -- Research -- Methodology -- Periodicals; Data mining -- Periodicals; 300.28557
• DOI: 10.1177/2053951718766624
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2053-9517

Abstract

Increasingly, social media platforms are understood by researchers to be valuable sites of politically-relevant discussions. However, analyses of social media data are typically undertaken by focusing on 'snapshots' of issues using query-keyword search strategies. This paper develops an alternative, less issue-based, mode of analysing Twitter data. It provides a framework for working qualitatively with longitudinally-oriented Twitter data (user-timelines), and uses an empirical case to consider the value and the challenges of doing so. Exploring how Twitter users place "everyday" talk around the socio-political issue of UK welfare provision, we draw on digital ethnography and narrative analysis techniques to analyse 25 user-timelines and identify three distinctions in users' practices: users' engagements with welfare as TV entertainment or as a socio-political concern; the degree of sustained engagement with said issues, and; the degree to which users' tweeting practices around welfare were congruent with or in contrast to their other tweets. With this analytic orientation, we demonstrate how a longitudinal analysis of user-timelines provides rich resources that facilitate a more nuanced understanding of user engagement in everyday socio-political discussions online.