Microblogging services such as Twitter and FriendFeed appear to be steadily gaining popularity among academics for work-related purposes (communication at conferences, discussion of publications, casual conversation). As part of a larger project on the evolution of scholarly communication I am today launching a study of academic uses of Twitter across disciplines.
One component of this study will be a corpus of tweets by international scholars from different fields over the course of one year. This corpus will be assembled via the account @scientwists, an automated user controlled via the Twitter API, and made available in the public domain after completion. The @scientwists account will follow a list of scholars put together from several sources, starting with this list assembled by David Bradley.*
The corpus will be anonymized, i.e. user names will not be legible. It will also be possible to exclude individual posts from the corpus via use of the hashtag #exclude. However, if you receive a notification that @scientwists is following you and you would prefer for your tweets not to be included in the corpus at all, please simply block @scientwists.
If you have questions or suggestions, please be sure to contact me on Twitter or via email.
- Cornelius Puschmann, Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf (about me)
Note: if you are not an academic and are being followed by @scientwists2 you have been randomly included in the control group for this study. Please block @scientwists2 if you prefer your tweets not to be used.
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