Phillip Brooker | University of Liverpool (original) (raw)

Papers by Phillip Brooker

Big Data & Society, 5(1), 1-13., 2018

Increasingly, social media platforms are understood by researchers to be valuable sites of politi... more Increasingly, social media platforms are understood by researchers to be valuable sites of politically-relevant discussions. However, analyses of social media data are typically undertaken by focusing on 'snapshots' of issues using query-keyword search strategies. This paper develops an alternative, less issue-based, mode of analysing Twitter data. It provides a framework for working qualitatively with longitudinally-oriented Twitter data (user-timelines), and uses an empirical case to consider the value and the challenges of doing so. Exploring how Twitter users place ''everyday'' talk around the socio-political issue of UK welfare provision, we draw on digital ethnography and narrative analysis techniques to analyse 25 user-timelines and identify three distinctions in users' practices: users' engagements with welfare as TV entertainment or as a socio-political concern; the degree of sustained engagement with said issues, and; the degree to which users' tweeting practices around welfare were congruent with or in contrast to their other tweets. With this analytic orientation , we demonstrate how a longitudinal analysis of user-timelines provides rich resources that facilitate a more nuanced understanding of user engagement in everyday socio-political discussions online.

CHI ‘18 Proceedings of the 36th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York: ACM, 1-12., 2018

The emergence of fake news, as well as filter bubbles and echo chambers, has precipitated renewed... more The emergence of fake news, as well as filter bubbles and echo chambers, has precipitated renewed attention upon the ways in which news is consumed, shared and reflected and commented upon. While online news comments sections offer space for pluralist and critical discussion, studies suggest that this rarely occurs. Motivated by common practices of annotating, defacing and scribbling on physical newspapers, we built a mobile app – Newsr – that supports co-annotation, in the form of graffiti, on online news articles, which we evaluated in-the-wild for one month. We report on how the app encouraged participants to reflect upon the act of choosing news stories, whilst promoting exploration, the critique of content, and the exposure of bias within the writing. Our findings highlight how the redesign of interactive online news experiences can facilitate more directed, " in-the-moment " critique of online news stories as well as encourage readers to expand the range of news content they read.

New Media & Society, 2017

Weight stigma results from the mediatisation of ‘obesity’: conceptually, a medicalised problem re... more Weight stigma results from the mediatisation of ‘obesity’: conceptually, a medicalised problem resulting from personal bodily irresponsibility. We undertake a frame analysis of 1452 comments on a thematically related online news article published via The Guardian, about the status of ‘obesity’ as a disability in European Union (EU) employment law. We identify three themes: (1) weight as a lifestyle choice or disability, (2) weight as an irresponsible choice and (3) weight as a simple or complex issue. We contend that the design of the commenting platform prevents counter-narratives from challenging the dominant (‘obesity’) framing for three reasons: (1) content is driven by comments appearing earlier in the corpus, (2) the commenting system primarily supports argument between polarised rhetorical positions and (3) the platform design discourages users from developing alternative terminologies for producing counter-narratives. In this way, we explore how weight stigma is propagated through online media, and how users’ comments intersect with the affordances of the platform itself.

Qualitative Research, 17(6), 610-626, 2017

Much of the excitement in social media analytics revolves around, a) capturing large-scale collec... more Much of the excitement in social media analytics revolves around, a) capturing large-scale collections of naturally-occurring talk, b) repurposing them as data, and, c) finding ways to speak sociologically about them. Researchers have raised concerns over the use of social media data in research (eg boyd and Crawford, 2012; Housley et al, 2014; Tinati et al, 2014), exploring the ontological and epistemological grounding of the emerging field. We contribute to this debate by drawing on Wittgensteinian philosophy to elucidate hitherto neglected aspects; namely that it is not just social scientists who are in the business of analysing social media, but users themselves. We explore how mainstream social media analytics research (1) overinflates the importance of sociological theories, concepts and methodologies (which do not typically feature in the accounts of social media users), (2) downplays the extent to which social media platforms already exhibit order prior to any sociological accounting of them, and, (3) thereby produces findings which explain social scientific perspectives rather than the phenomena themselves. We reformulate the ontological and epistemological basis of social media analytics research from a Wittgensteinian perspective concerned with what it makes sense to say about social media, as members of society and as researchers studying those members. Such a project aims to explore social media users’ language as a practice embedded within the context of social life and online communication. This reflects the everyday use of language as an evolving toolkit for undertaking social interaction, pointing towards an alternative conception of social media analytics.

Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 26(3), 345-385., 2017

In this paper we investigate how online counter-discourse is designed, deployed and orchestrated ... more In this paper we investigate how online counter-discourse is designed, deployed and orchestrated by activists to challenge dominant narratives around socio-political issues. We focus on activism related to the UK broadcast media's negative portrayal of welfare benefit claimants; portrayals characterised as " poverty porn " by critics. Using critical discourse analysis, we explore two activist campaigns countering the TV programme Benefits Street. Through content analysis of social media, associated traditional media texts, and interviews with activists, our analysis highlights the way activists leverage the specific technological affordances of different social media and other online platforms in order to manage and configure counter-discourse activities. We reveal how activists use different platforms to carefully control and contest discursive spaces, and the ways in which they utilise both online and offline activities in combination with new and broadcast media to build an audience for their work. We discuss the challenges associated with measuring the success of counter-discourse, and how activists rely on combinations of social media analytics and anecdotal feedback in order to ascertain that their campaigns are successful. We also discuss the often hidden power-relationships in such campaigns, especially where there is ambiguity regarding the grassroots legitimacy of activism, and where effort is placed into controlling and owning the propagation of counter-discourse. We conclude by highlighting a number of areas for further work around the blurred distinctions between corporate advocacy, digilantism and grassroots activism.

CHI ‘17 Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York: ACM, 2252-2263., 2017

The recent proliferation of a reality TV genre that focusses on welfare recipients has led to con... more The recent proliferation of a reality TV genre that focusses on welfare recipients has led to concerns that prime-time media experiences are exacerbating misconceptions, and stifling critical debate, around major societal issues such as welfare reform and poverty. Motivated by arguments that 'second screening' practices offer opportunities to engage viewers with issues of political concern, we describe the design and evaluation of two smartphone apps that facilitate and promote more critical live-viewing of reality TV. Our apps, Spotting Guide and Moral Compass, encourage users to identify, categorise, tag and filter patterns and tropes within reality TV, as well as reinterpret social media posts associated with their broadcast. We show that such interactions encourage critical thinking around typical editing and production techniques and foster co-discussion and reflection amongst viewers. We discuss, more broadly, how these interactions encourage users to identify the wider consequences and framings of reality TV, and offer implications and considerations for design that provokes criticality and reflection in second screening contexts.

CHI ‘17 Proceedings of the 35th Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York: ACM, 3488-3500., 2017

Bots are estimated to account for well over half of all web traffic, yet they remain an understud... more Bots are estimated to account for well over half of all web traffic, yet they remain an understudied topic in HCI. In this paper we present the findings of an analysis of 2284 submissions across three discussion groups dedicated to the request, creation and discussion of bots on Reddit. We set out to examine the qualities and functionalities of bots and the practical and social challenges surrounding their creation and use. Our findings highlight the prevalence of misunderstandings around the capabilities of bots, misalignments in discourse between novices who request and more expert members who create them, and the prevalence of requests that are deemed to be inappropriate for the Reddit community. In discussing our findings, we suggest future directions for the design and development of tools that support more carefully guided and reflective approaches to bot development for novices, and tools to support exploring the consequences of contextually-inappropriate bot ideas.

Government Information Quarterly, , 2017

Social media have been widely embraced by governments for information dissemination and engagemen... more Social media have been widely embraced by governments for information dissemination and engagement but less is known about their value as information sources. Crowdsourced content from social media can improve inclusivity in policy development but it is not always clear how it can form part of policy evidence. The paper builds on the conceptual framework of crowd capabilities to examine the value of social media data in evidence-based policy. Acquisition and assimilation – the two elements of crowd capabilities – drive our exploratory case analysis in the context of agricultural policies in the UK. The study combined qualitative data from interviews and workshops with an analysis of networks of farmers on Twitter. Policy makers were broadly positive about the immediacy, cost-effectiveness and diversity of useful input that can be sourced from online sources. Limitations were identified in terms of representation and inclusion of participants in large datasets that are sourced from open platforms. We compare social media data to traditional sources of evidence and further reflect on the new capabilities that can support the needs of policy makers in this endeavor.

Symbolic Interaction, 39(3), 463-483., 2016

This article examines amateur music-making using a digital audio workstation (DAW), showing how a... more This article examines amateur music-making using a digital audio workstation (DAW), showing how audio and software are used as resources for creating compositions. The article has two aims. Firstly, to depict how digital music-making is formed from routine interactional techniques. Secondly, to probe how researchers might account for such multi-modal activity through a heuristic device: the 'n th member'. Whereas sociology has typically been concerned with the cultural facets of how music is made and consumed, we explore the material practices of collaborative song creation utilising conversation analytic techniques – 'turn-taking' and 'next-selection' – to capture two key interactional moments.

J. Daniels, K. Gregory & T. McMillan-Cottom (eds.) Digital Sociologies, Bristol: Policy Press, 463-485., 2016

He has published in the areas of race and representation, critical pedagogy, digital networks, an... more He has published in the areas of race and representation, critical pedagogy, digital networks, and is the author of Multicultural Encounters (Palgrave). His recent work is exploring social media, assemblages and affect, and online antagonisms. He is particularly interested in developing methodologies for exploring networked racism as an emergent phenomena. Sanjay is a founding editor of the open access journal darkmatter. is a Research Associate at the University of Bath, UK working in social media analytics, with a particular interest in the exploration of research methodologies to support the emerging field. His background is in sociology, drawing especially on ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, science and technology studies, computer-supported cooperative work and human-computer interaction. Phillip has been previously contributed to the development of Chorus (www.chorusanalytics.co.uk); a Twitter data collection and visualisation suite. Phillip currently works on CuRAtOR (Challenging online feaR And OtheRing), and interdisciplinary project which focuses on how 'cultures of fear' are propagated through online 'othering'.

Big Data & Society, 3(2), 1-12., 2016

In the few years since the advent of ‘Big Data’ research, social media analytics has begun to acc... more In the few years since the advent of ‘Big Data’ research, social media analytics has begun to accumulate studies drawing on social media as a resource and tool for research work. Yet, there has been relatively little attention paid to the development
of methodologies for handling this kind of data. The few works that exist in this area often reflect upon the implications of ‘grand’ social science methodological concepts for new social media research (i.e. they focus on general issues such as sampling, data validity, ethics, etc.). By contrast, we advance an abductively oriented methodological suite designed to explore the construction of phenomena played out through social media. To do this, we use a software tool – Chorus – to illustrate a visual analytic approach to data. Informed by visual analytic principles, we posit a two-by-two methodological model of social media analytics, combining two data collection strategies with two analytic modes.We go on to demonstrate each of these four approaches ‘in action’, to help clarify how and why they might be used to address various research questions.

H. Snee, C. Hine, Y. Morey, S. Roberts & H. Watson (eds.) Digital Methods for Social Science: An Interdisciplinary Guide to Research Innovation. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 34-50., 2016

The present chapter explores the technical and computational processes through which social media... more The present chapter explores the technical and computational processes through which social media data is shaped into research findings. The authors make this argument by depicting the effects of two practical issues - API rate limiting in Twitter data collection and the use of spatial mapping algorithms in visualising those data - on resulting analyses. Such issues are not problematic to social media analytic research; rather, they can be used as resources for helping to characterise and understand the data at hand. Hence, the authors work to demonstrate the value in incorporating these reflexive analyses of technical and computational processes into our accounts; to advocate thinking in assemblages as a requirement for making analytic claims with 'big' social media data.

CHI ‘15 Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, New York: ACM, 3177-3186., 2015

This paper presents an empirical investigation of how people appropriated Twitter for socio-polit... more This paper presents an empirical investigation of how people appropriated Twitter for socio-political talk in response to a television (TV) portrayal of people supported by state welfare and benefits. Our findings reveal how online discussion during, and in-between, TV broadcasts was characterised by distinctly different qualities, topics and user behaviours. These findings offer design opportunities for social media services to (i) support more balanced real-time commentaries of politically-charged media, (ii) actively promote discussion to continue after, and between, programming; and (iii) incorporate different motivations and attitudes towards socio-political concerns, as well as different practices of communicating those concerns. We contribute to the developing HCI literature on how social media intersects with political and civic engagement and specifically highlight the ways in which Twitter interacts with other forms of media as a site of everyday socio-political talk and debate.

SAGE Cases in Methodology, SAGE., 2014

The power and promise of social media as a resource and tool for doing social research is widely ... more The power and promise of social media as a resource and tool for doing social research is widely recognised and much vaunted. Social media data are becoming an increasingly attractive resource for social scientists, but the question remains as to what exactly we might want to do with data like these. This study describes a small-scale interdisciplinary project in medical sociology which instigated the development of an innovative method for making practical use of ‘big data’ drawn from Twitter. What results is a depiction of how a collaboration between software developers, requirements engineers and social scientists demonstrated a need for a new method of data capture, a description of the method by which that need was addressed, and a discussion of the value of the insights that can be drawn through using that method.

Social Media in Social Research: Blogs on Blurring the Boundaries, Pressbooks Virtual Publication, UK, 123-127., 2014

Social Media in Social Research: Blogs on Blurring the Boundaries, Pressbooks Virtual Publication, UK, 103-107., 2014

P. Tolmie & M. Rouncefield (eds.) Ethnomethodology at Play. Surrey: Ashgate, 135-155., 2013