Twitter in academic events: A study of temporal usage, communication, sentimental and topical patterns in 16 Computer Science co

Twitter is often referred to as a backchannel for conferences. While the main conference takes place in a physical setting, on-site and off-site attendees socialize, introduce new ideas or broadcast information by microblogging on Twitter. In this paper we analyze scholars’ Twitter usage in 16 Computer Science conferences over a timespan of five years. Our primary finding is that over the years there are differences with respect to the uses of Twitter, with an increase of informational activity (retweets and URLs), and a decrease of conversational usage (replies and mentions), which also impacts the network structure – meaning the amount of connected components – of the informational and conversational networks. We also applied topic modeling over the tweets’ content and found that when clustering conferences according to their topics the resulting dendrogram clearly reveals the similarities and differences of the actual research interests of those events. Furthermore, we...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2016
• Where: COMCOM
• Authors: Denis Parra, Christoph Trattner, Diego Gómez, Matías Hurtado, Xidao Wen, Yu-Ru Lin
• Keywords: COMCOM 2016