This paper will address the tools employed and the ethical, practical and methodological challenges of my research by using the Twitter data collected during the G20 2014 in Brisbane. The new computational tools developed in digital methods are really powerful on mapping Twitter conversations related to a particular topic. Nevertheless, there are still several limitations in the collection and in the analysis of the data. These methodological challenges are addressed in my research project, which aims to explore the growing of Public Diplomacy activities on social media. Indeed, according to the Twiplomacy Study (2014), the vast majority of the 193 UN member countries have a presence on Twitter and more than two-thirds of all heads of state and heads of government have personal accounts on the social network.
Yet, the study of Public Diplomacy on social media is still struggling to find an appropriate research method that is able to capture the complexity of the social media communication and assess engagement and participation. Particularly, these tasks have become challenging due to the new phenomenon of the cross-platform communication. Indeed, nowadays users share and comment news on social media, while traditional media, like TV channels and newspapers often report back what has been discussed on social media.
By analysing the Twitter data collected during the G20 2014 in Brisbane, I will describe some aspects of my methodological approach for the study of Public Diplomacy on Twitter. The paper will suggest that we need a mixed approach to comprehend the context and the cross-platform communication. To do so, tweets should be understood as units of information related to each other and visualised in the form of networks. Once key actors are found and relations among the different nodes visualised, a count of the URLs in our dataset will provide interesting information in terms of contents shared in the conversation. By manually looking at the information shared, the context of the conversation will emerge. In this sense, large datasets should be first visualised as whole and then analysed by zooming in the dataset and selecting particular interesting units, which will contain clues to understand the context and the flow of information between different platforms and websites.
2. Structure
● Public Diplomacy and Social Media;
● Case study: the G20 2014 in Brisbane;
● Public Diplomacy and News Media actors on Twitter;
● Computational and manual analysis combined: an example;
● Final methodological thoughts.
3. Public Diplomacy
● Public Diplomacy is about engaging foreign publics to advance
foreign policy (Cull, 2008);
● There is no single agreed-upon definition of the term.
5. Research’s aims
● To explore Digital Methods for monitoring Public Diplomacy activities on
Twitter. This means experimenting with the method to get insights about
the method itself.
● To critique and assess Public Diplomacy actors’ use of social media and
their articulations of influence within Twitter networks (soft power
articulation).
● To examine how Public Diplomacy actors’ articulation of influence is
mediated by non-diplomatic actors (News media, NGO’s, international
collective action groups etc).
7. The G20 2014 in Brisbane: Mapping influence
through Twitter networks
Keyword Collection tool N. of Tweets Length of time
g20 DMI-TCAT 890,631 1-16 November 2014
8. Public Diplomacy and News Media actors on Twitter
The role of mainstream news media in mediating
the audience's perception of the leaders’ agendas.
9. How mainstream news media mediate Public Diplomacy
actors’ agendas
● Through the process of framing the discussion before and during the
economic forum by connecting issues and actors (the G20 leaders in our
case). This is related to the well-known process of the agenda setting
theory (Shaw, 1977). Indeed, even though there is a potential direct
communication between Public Diplomacy actors and citizens, such
communication flow is still framed and partially mediated by
mainstream news media within and beyond Twitter networks.
● In turn, mainstream news media amplify the discussion unfolding on
Twitter, which is reported on newspaper and TV news coverage. This
results in a circular process.
11. An example: following the issue “shirt front”
13 October 2014
“I’m going to shirtfront Mr Putin (…) I am going to be saying to Mr Putin
Australians were murdered. There’ll be a lot of tough conversations with Russia
and I suspect the conversation I have with Mr Putin will be the toughest
conversation of all” (Sydney Morning Herald, Massola, 2014).
20. 7.30, ABC, 11 November 2014
Tony "Tough Talk" Abbott versus "Virile" Vladimir Putin. How much macho can
you take? Two great men with a phobia of fabric and a penchant for pectoral
promenading set to meet face to face in the world's grandest car park, the G20.
Zooming in: Google news data and framing activities
21. Tony Abbott's threat to 'shirtfront' Vladimir Putin is escalating dramatically.
Seven News, 12 November 2014
Seven News can reveal a fleet of Russian warships is steaming towards Australia - a defiant
show of force from the super power ahead of this weekend's G20 meeting of world leaders. In
diplomatic terms, it's a worrying development for the Abbott government after its attack on
Russia's role in the downing of MH17.
TV News Databases
28. A mixed approach
● Ask questions to my data through queries;
● Create subsets by zoom in and out in order to observe data at different
scales;
● Triangulate data with other sources: i.e. news archives, Google trends,
Google news.
29. Conclusions
Big data and Digital Methods (Rogers, 2009) generated concerns in relation to
epistemology, access, size and ethics. Such concerns can be translated into
opportunities if they lead to new and mixed methodological approaches.
Therefore, this paper suggests
● To go beyond methodological dichotomies thin/thick data or
computational (quantitative) / manual (qualitative) analysis to get a
deeper understanding of the data and explore the surrounding context
(Lewis, Zamith & Hermida, 2013; Wang, 2013).
● To experiment mixed methodological approaches in the analysis of
born-digital data, along with the combination and intersection of
different sources.
● Transparency into the mechanisms and procedures embedded in the
computational analysis and visualisations.
