Robert James Ackland
Robert Ackland is a Professor in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University (ANU), specialising in social network analysis, computational social science and the social science of the Internet. Robert leads the Virtual Observatory for the Study of Online Networks (VOSON) lab (http://vosonlab.net) which develops open source software for the collection and analysis of network and text data from social media and the WWW. Robert’s book Web Social Science was published by Sage in 2013, and he teaches courses on online research methods and the digital economy and society.
Sessions
Social media have become an integral part of the public sphere. It is important to understand how social media are facilitating or impeding political deliberation, a process whereby individuals with differing perspectives and opinions engage in discussion, potentially revising their opinions upon hearing the arguments of others. This presentation outlines new research into political deliberation on Twitter. We used a set of debate- and election-related hashtags to first undertake a large-scale collection of tweets authored during the first 2020 US presidential debate. We then used the v2 Twitter API (accessed via the voson.tcn R package) to collect the wider Twitter conversations that these tweets were part of, so our final dataset also included debate-related tweets that did not feature the target hashtags. The data collection resulted in a dataset of over 11K conversations (with each conversation represented as a tree network with a “conversation starter” tweet as the root node and all the subsequent replies and replies-to-replies). We then implemented an approach for constructing random samples of root-to-leaf interaction sequences extracted from these conversations, with the samples being used for subsequent qualitative coding of discussion dynamics. This presentation provides an overview of the conversation data collection and sampling approach and then outlines some preliminary findings regarding the deliberative nature of Twitter activity during the first debate, constructing a measure of deliberation involving the depth and breadth of conversation tree networks.
Recording link: https://acspri-org-au.zoom.us/rec/share/jG2oPYAxGbCXdVm76fy6IhAi4brxwMoxOeP2QCK3nrPdeQ5j9wU0fMRuutuGsktE.GGS6vN76zGxbrfPv?startTime=1669184529000