Presentation by Carolin Gerlitz and Bernhard Rieder at the AoIR conference in Daegu, South Korea on October 23, 2014

1. Tweets are Not Created Equal
Intersecting Devices in the 1% Sample
Carolin Gerlitz & Bernhard Rieder
IR15 - Boundaries & Intersections
October 23, 2014

2. Digging deeper into
Twitter devices
The Twitter API's 1% random sample can
be used to explore, baseline, contextualize,
verify, etc. (Gerlitz & Rieder 2013,
Morstatter et al. 2014).
How can we qualify individual elements in
relation to a larger platform ecology?
The presentation inquires more deeply into
the role devices play on Twitter.
We used a week-long random sample of
tweets to further explore this aspect.
(14.6.2014 - 20.6.2014, n = 31.707.162)

3. Devices intersect use
practices
There has been a proliferation of very
different devices (mobile, desktop, web,
buttons, bots, etc.) from which people send
their tweets. It's full of devices!
Thinking Twitter as ecology of connected
devices, we ask (1) how we can qualify
devices and (2) how devices can enable us
to unpack metrics for studying use cultures.
Frequency based metrics suggest that the
units they count are equivalent (e.g. tweets
per time for a certain hashtag).
Do we need to conceptualize devices as
intervening variables?

4. iPhone
Tweetdeck
Web client
Tweetadder
Instagram Tribez

5. iPhone
Instagram
Tweetadder
Tweetadder

6. Hashtag qualification
#iraq

7. Hashtag qualification
#CallMeCam

8. Hashtag qualification
#gameinsight

9. Hashtag qualification
#love

10. Devices & use practices
Desktop clients (Web, Tweetdeck, etc.) are
overrepresented in news conversations;
Tweetdeck also points towards
professional social media practices.
The iPhone is the preferred microphone of
the American teenager.
Custom autopost clients (platforms, games,
etc.) are engaged in activity loops.
Automation clients (dlvr.it, IFTT, or
Tweetadder) empower promotion, spam,
hijacking, and syndication practices.
Different devices have different
capacities and enable different ways of
engaging with the Twitter platform
(posting, observing, responding, etc.).

11. Domain qualification
nytimes.com

12. Domain qualification
youtube.com

13. Domain qualification
etsy.com

14. Devices intersect
practices
Tweets are not created equal. Devices imply different regimes of "being on Twitter"
that are caught up in different perspectives, purposes, and politics.
Twitter takes part in complex platform ecologies that mediate tweeting in different
ways and are thus co-constitutive of practices. Devices intersect practices.
For Internet researchers, this creates problems and opportunities. Devices as
intervening variables can both skew and explain.
Frequency counts that do not take into account devices are problematic: do 100K
tweets from Tweetadder "mean" or "indicate" the same thing as 100K sent from the
iPhone? They refer to different populations, practices, purposes, and politics.

15. Conclusion
Frequency counts are not comparable from the outset, but need to be made
comparable by including devices in the interpretation.
Devices need to be taken into account when sampling, cleaning, analyzing, and
interpreting Twitter data.
This kind of unpacking and repacking of components in the platform ecologies can
be performed for various other elements. (cf. Bruns & Stieglitz 2013)

16. Thank you.
Carolin Gerlitz, c.gerlitz@uva.nl, @cgrltz
Bernhard Rieder, rieder@uva.nl, @riederb
DMI-TCAT (Borra & Rieder 2014), open source, available at:
https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/dmi-tcat