vextrove/itrm

Introduction to research methods

Research Question

On November 8th 2017, Twitter doubled its tweet character limit from 140 to 280. Has doubling the character limit caused Twitter users to provide more arguments supporting their opinions than Twitter?

Motivation

Twitter as a platform has a considerable impact on society on politics. However, some people say that Twitter is not a good platform for discourse. This claim often includes the argument that the character limit makes it necessary for Twitter users to be concise and to the point, implying that this does not contribute to effective, productive or otherwise meaningful discussion. This argument is often met with the counterargument that the doubling of the character limit has made it possible for Twitter users to discuss topics better. This research could show whether people have indeed been using the extra characters in tweets to provide more arguments for their statements.

Hypothesis

The hypothesis is that there will be a relative increase in the number of arguments provided for statements in Tweets after November 8th 2017, which would show that the doubling of the character limit has made it easier for people to convey reasons for their statements or opinions.

Methodology

Subordinating conjunctions are words such as ”because”, ”therefore” and ”thus”, and they signal arguments supporting a statement in a sentence. Matras (1997) The rate of arguments supporting statements in tweets can be determined by measuring the amount of subordinating conjunctions in that tweet. A computer program will be used to count the number of Dutch and English subordinating conjunctions, in two samples of tweets from before and after November 8th 2017. These two samples of tweets will be obtained from the Twitter corpus accesible via Karora Resources at ssh @karora.let.rug.nl, which contains tweets sorted by year, month and day.

If the hypothesis holds true, there will be in increase in the number of subordinating conjunctions in tweets posted after November 8th 2017 relative to the number of subordinating conjunctions in tweets posted before November 8th 2017.

Contingency Matrix

The independent variable is whether a tweet is posted before or after the doubling of the character limit. The dependant variable is the amount of subordinating conjunctions in tweets.

References

Matras, Y. (1997). The function and typology of coordinating conjunctions: evidence from discourse and language-contact situations. Discourse and pragmatics in functional grammar , 177–191.