Analysing scholarly contributions to public debate with social media issue mapping: A case study of the Australia Day controversy

It is increasingly important for academic researchers to demonstrate the impact of their work, not only on their respective fields, but also on culture and society more broadly. This article outlines and demonstrates a new approach for investigating the impact of scholarly contributions to public debates using digital methods and data drawn from a range of digital media platforms. The multi-platform issue mapping approach is applied to an analysis of the social media conversation surrounding the January 2018 Australia Day controversy, with a specific focus on the role of ‘amplifier platforms’ like The Conversation in bringing scholarly perspectives to a general audience. The article identifies a number of key scholarly contributions to the debate, and analyses how they were shared and discussed across the diverse issue network that emerged on Twitter during this controversy. While the dataset was limited in scale and focused on a single case study, our findings suggest that articles with a strong positionality are taken up by like-minded, interest-based subcultures and communities, while those that demonstrate authority and/or provide an overview of the issues at hand may be able to reach across these different groups. Finally, the article discusses the future potential of this approach for the analysis of scholarly impact on matters of public concern