Twitter data analysis for studying communities of practice in the media industry

Komorowski, Marlen ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1944-9855, Do Huu, Tien and Deligiannis, Nikos 2018. Twitter data analysis for studying communities of practice in the media industry. Telematics and Informatics 35 (1) , pp. 195-212. 10.1016/j.tele.2017.11.001

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Abstract

Today, more and more physical communities of practice, a concept that describes a group of people that share a passion and interact regularly at events to exchange knowledge, utilize social media, such as Twitter. Brotaru, for instance, is such a physical community of practice for media professionals in Brussels. It is a monthly meet-up of videogame developers in various locations in Brussels. Furthermore, Twitter becomes widely acknowledged as important instrument for learning and community formation in the virtual world. But, do these communities of practice use Twitter only to promote their physical activities of learning? Or, are the activities of the physical communities further extended into the virtual world meaning that virtual communities of practice emerge from them? This article suggests a novel mixed-methods approach based on qualitative and quantitative data to measure the role of Twitter for physical communities of practice. The method applies different statistical measures and analysis on harvested Twitter data and additionally brings two of the most used methods in Twitter analysis together, social network analysis and text data analysis (a.k.a., content analysis). Four different communities of practice in Brussels’ media industry and their activities and followers on Twitter have been analysed. The findings showed that the activities of the communities of practice extend into the Twitter sphere as the online communities are characterised by a shared domain, a lively community and shared practices. The analysis further revealed that Twitter offers three main opportunities for the activities of communities of practice: it offers geographical extension; it gives temporal autonomy; and, it can be used to diversify the practices.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Journalism, Media and Culture
Publisher:	Elsevier
ISSN:	0736-5853
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	3 February 2020
Date of Acceptance:	1 November 2017
Last Modified:	24 Nov 2024 22:45
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/128381

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