RESOURCE: First look at analysing threaded Twitter discussions from large archives using NodeXL #moocmooc Jisc CETIS MASHe
There are three main reactions that are relatively easy to extract from twitter: retweets, favouring and replies. There are issues with what these actions actually indicate as well as the reliability of the data. For example users will use ‘favouring’ in different ways, and not everyone uses a twitter client that can or uses a reply tweet (if you start a message @reply without clicking a reply button Twitter looses the thread).
But lets ignore these issues for now and start with the hypothesis that a reaction to a tweet is worth further study. Lets also, for now, narrow down on threaded discussions. How might we do this? As mentioned in Sheila’s post we’ve been archiving #moocmooc tweets using Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet TAGS v3. As well as the tweet text other metadata is recorded including a tweet unique identifier and, where available the id of the tweet it is replying to.
Written by Brian S McGowan, PhD
Dr. McGowan has served in leadership positions in numerous medical educational organizations and commercial supporters and is a Fellow of the Alliance (FACEhp). He founded the Outcomes Standardization Project, launched and hosted the Alliance Podcast, and most recently launched and hosts the JCEHP Emerging Best Practices in CPD podcast. In 2012 he Co-Founded ArcheMedX, Inc, a healthcare informatics and e-learning company to apply his research in practice.
