Academia turning to social networks like Twitter
Last week’s Times Square bomb scare got people talking. And in just two days on Twitter, they generated roughly 40,000 messages.
It may be digital racket to many. But to University of Iowa political-science Professor Bob Boynton, the mass of messages, totaling as many as 5 million characters at 140 each, offers a glimpse at political discourse.
“We know people have been doing this forever, but we’re finally able to get our hands on it,” he said.
The professor, who last month garnered an award for his research related to the social-networking site, is part of a movement. Academics across the country have begun to legitimize social media services as valuable research and teaching tools, with the Library of Congress becoming a recent fan.
Officials there announced last month they would archive all public Tweets ever posted — more than 50 million each day.
Boyton already conducts a smaller scale project using UI resources at the Main Library.
Eight computers crawl Twitter for given keywords related to news events. Boynton can then produce quantitative data about the mass of Tweets. The Times Square case is one of several recent examples. Boynton — whose work spans at least five decades and more than tha number of research areas — said there is too much political discussion happening online for researchers to ignore it.
Bending his arm and wrist into an exponentially growing j-curve, Boynton illustrated the growth curve of users and said, “There got to be enough people doing it that I thought it would be important.”
A study released last week by researchers at Babson College found several of those people are college faculty members such as Boynton.
In fact, 80 percent of college and university instructors maintain a social presence online. More than half of the nearly 1,000 surveyed use Twitter, Facebook, or similar services in their classes, according to the study.
Jeff Seaman, a researcher who helped conduct the survey, said Boynton’s particular use is rare. More often, instructors employ new media to discover and share content.
“Has it become legitimate as a source of useful material? My answer would have to be yes,” said Seaman, the co-director of the Babson Survey Research Group.
For instance, UI engineering Assistant Professor Charles Stanier has put his students to work on Delicious, a link-sharing network, to find relevant material on the web.
Stanier required last year’s Green Chemical and Energy Technologies students to enlist in the social network.
“Some students like the process of sharing what they found with everyone else and not be a pest about it by e-mailing everyone,” Stanier said.
Crowdsourcing, delegating research tasks to a group, usually via the web, improved the content of Stanier’s course, he said.
Meanwhile, though, David McCartney said ever-shifting technology presents challenges for tracing and recording information for him in his role as the university’s archivist.
“For example, the 3-inch diskettes widely used in the 1980s and 1990s have long fallen out of use, and publications that used to be printed are in many cases now available only online,” he said.
Despite the difficulties, McCartney echoed Boynton’s sentiment that new media offer valuable access to individual perspectives.
“Journalism has been called ‘the first draft of history,’ and social media have stepped in to assume that same role in terms of providing historical records,” he said.
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