SCHOLARS’ INTERACTIONS ON TWITTER: A CASE STUDY ON OCEAN RESEARCHERS’ CONFERENCE PARTICIPATION

Abstract

Twitter is a robust tool with which to analyze conference participation for increasing visibility, measuring public engagement, and other scholarly activities. This paper offers an overview of conference participation by implementing natural language processing techniques to generate sentiment analysis and social network analysis. The study assists conference organizers and researchers by providing helpful indicators that measure user engagement and social relationships on Twitter. To accomplish this, we examined a sample of 8,715 tweets from eight prestigious ocean conferences and participating researchers who attended them in the year 2018 to 2020. We used VADER to perform sentiment analysis and Gephi network tool to generate social interconnectivity. The results revealed the amount of user engagement as well as the sentiment of each conference in addition to researcher and generated networks that represented their social relationships. VADER further exposed the most frequent topics referenced and hashtags used in Twitter interactions for a conference.