Researching with Twitter timeline data: A demonstration via “everyday” socio-political talk around welfare provision

• Published in: Big data & society 2018-03, Vol.5 (1)
• Main Authors: Brooker, Phillip, Barnett, Julie, Vines, John, Lawson, Shaun, Feltwell, Tom, Long, Kiel, Wood, Gavin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Digital media; Empirical analysis; Ethnography; Internet; Politics; Social media; Social networks; Television
• ISSN: 2053-9517; 2053-9517
• DOI: 10.1177/2053951718766624

Increasingly, social media platforms are understood by researchers to be valuable sites of politically-relevant discussions. However, analyses of social media data are typically undertaken by focusing on ‘snapshots’ of issues using query-keyword search strategies. This paper develops an alternative, less issue-based, mode of analysing Twitter data. It provides a framework for working qualitatively with longitudinally-oriented Twitter data (user-timelines), and uses an empirical case to consider the value and the challenges of doing so. Exploring how Twitter users place “everyday” talk around the socio-political issue of UK welfare provision, we draw on digital ethnography and narrative analysis techniques to analyse 25 user-timelines and identify three distinctions in users’ practices: users’ engagements with welfare as TV entertainment or as a socio-political concern; the degree of sustained engagement with said issues, and; the degree to which users’ tweeting practices around welfare were congruent with or in contrast to their other tweets. With this analytic orientation, we demonstrate how a longitudinal analysis of user-timelines provides rich resources that facilitate a more nuanced understanding of user engagement in everyday socio-political discussions online.