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Approaching Completeness: Capturing a Hashtagged Twitter Conversation and Its Follow-On Conversation

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Social Science Computer Review

Published online on

Abstract

The aim of this article is to engage with problems of sampling and completeness currently discussed within data science through the specific example of conversations in Twitter. Some of the difficulties involved in Twitter concern restrictions laid out by platform owners, restrictions that make it difficult for researchers to collect complete conversations. A contribution is made through the development of a method for collecting and analyzing follow-on conversations around a set of hashtags. This was made possible through the simultaneous tracking of a set of hashtags and prominent participants in the conversation. The full set of tweets was compared to the subset of tweets including either of the selected hashtags. Including follow-on conversation increased the set of tweets by 56% and the set of tweeting users by 17%. It is also shown that different network analysis techniques and filtering options give different results with regard to prominent users.