Researching Twitter:A Large-Scale Mixed-Methods Project to Study How Journalists Use Twitter During Elections

In 2015, I designed a research project to examine whether Twitter provides an arena where information exchange, debate, and circulation of ideas take place. In other words, whether we can find manifestations of the public sphere on Twitter. Given the central role journalism holds in Habermas’ original perception of the public sphere, I also set to explore the role of journalism in the platform. Therefore, and by using the 2015 General Elections in the United Kingdom as a case study, I evaluated (1) how journalists in the United Kingdom were using Twitter to cover or discuss the elections of that year and (2) whether this new arena could be considered as (a) new—digital—public sphere(s). The present case study focuses on the first question and addresses the challenges of conducting a large-scale analysis of tweets by employing a mixed-method approach that combines elements from qualitative and quantitative methods and that relies on the premises of digital ethnography