Cornelius Puschmann's Blog » scientwists

One week of Scientwist tweeting (January 18 – 25)

cornelius — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 22:51:45 +0000

Here’s a list of URLs and hashtags that were popular among the @scientwists community last week. I realize that this is just a long enumeration, but I’m planning to publish these stats in a more concise format in the near future.

January 18th
http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2010/01/top-11-things-i-learned-at-science.html
http://deepseanews.com/2010/01/miriam-joins-us-at-dsn/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/jan/18/running-brain-memory-cell-growth
#scio10
#Biotechnology
#hcsm

January 19th
http://trueslant.com/ryansager/2010/01/18/science-reporting-gone-wild/
http://timesonline.typepad.com/science/2010/01/science-on-the-bbc.html
http://friendfeed.com/brembs/177a01db/bertrand-russell-on-god-1959
#scio10
#Biotechnology
#ten23

January 20th
http://www.shortyawards.com/
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/nada-importa
http://friendfeed.com/jcbradley/0a46ac22/science-online-2010-thoughts
#scio10
#health
#technology

January 21st
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2010-01/five-reasons-henrietta-lacks-most-important-woman-medical-history
http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2010/01/enough-w-good-here-are-top10-problems-w.html
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn18423-viruses-use-hive-intelligence-to-focus-their-attack.html
#scio10
#technology
#ten23

January 22nd
http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs19/f/2007/248/a/f/dna_strand_corset_32_piercings_by_mizuzinkaholik.jpg
http://friendfeed.com/danielmietchen/cbfc448b/collaborative-futures-3-mike-linksvayer
http://scienceblogs.com/bookoftrogool/2010/01/scientists_why_your_access_to.php
#scio10
#corporateeyesontheprize
#technology

January 23rd
http://www.badscience.net/2010/01/12-monkeys-no-8-wait-sorry-i-meant-14/
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/aw8
http://friendfeed.com/pansapiens/212fde9c/you-know-your-research-is-original-when
#scio10
#3wordsconservativeshate
#FF

January 24th
http://www.shortyawards.com/
http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/printers-row/2010/01/eureka-great-discoveries-in-new-science-books.html
http://friendfeed.com/science-2-0/3124a7c3/looking-for-help-on-building-list-of-social-web
#3wordsconservativeshate
#retailpolitics
#scio10

January 25th
http://iambiotech.org/2010/01/25/biotech-roundup-monday-january-25th/?utm_source=hootsuite&utm_medium=tweet&utm_content=roundup&utm_campaign=hootsuite
http://friendfeed.com/mfenner/04c40a1a/scientists-and-librarians-friend-or-foe
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/markchangizi/100004573/do-ant-colonies-have-something-in-common-with-the-human-body/
#scio10
#hcsm
#science

Things that 500+ scientists (possibly including you) have been tweeting recently

cornelius — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 00:59:57 +0000

Since starting the Scientwists Project a bit over a week ago, I’ve been busy hacking up Bash and R scripts in order to analyze the data produced by the 500+ scholars that I’m following. Here’s a first glimpse of what they’ve been tweeting about, specifically the URLs and hashtags they’ve used.

In total, I’ve collected about 12.000 tweets since January 7th, containing 4.750 different URLs and 1.130 different hashtags.

10 most popular URLs

1. The Shorty Awards

2. Dennis Meadows: The Oil Drum: Economics and Limits to Growth: What’s Sustainable?

3. Björn Brembs: Social filtering of scientific information – a view beyond Twitter

4. BioData Product Blog: Laboratory Notebooks: A thing of the past?

5. Forbes.com: Illumina’s Cheap New Gene Machine

6. A photograph of clouds that seem to resemble Great Britain

7. Times Online: Baroness Greenfield loses her job in Royal Institution shake-up

8. Mr. Gunn: Cell launches a new format for the presentation of research articles online

9. Daniel Mietchen: On the need for a global academic internet platform [ref to Nadja Kutz: arxiv.org/abs/0803.1360]

10. Rebecca Skloot: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

These were tweeted between 5 (#9 and #10) and 30 (#1) times. However, tracking URLs is complicated by the fact that many different addresses may point to the same source, especially since people use a variety of different URL shorteners. This is something I’ll resolve later, so for now this fairly anecdotal.

15 most popular hashtags

1. #scio10 (391x)
2. #scidebate (84x)
3. #fb (75x)
4. #science (68x)
5. #technology (67x)
6. #tcot (58x)
7. #orca (54x)
8. #debateanatel (53x)
9. #Glee (31x)
10. #ff (27x)
11. #HeLa (26x)
12. #uksnow (26x)
13. #Haiti (25x)
14. #NetDE (24x)
15. #gov20 (21x)

Obviously some of these are automatically generated (#fb and #ff), but there’s a fair share of interesting ones. I’m expecting #scio10 will dominate the next few days even more visibly.

Hope it’s informative – let me know if you have any questions.

The Scientwists Project

cornelius — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 14:23:22 +0000

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.