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Language, Twitter and Academic Conferences

Published:24 August 2015Publication History

ABSTRACT

Using Twitter during academic conferences is a way of engaging and connecting an audience inherently multicultural by the nature of scientific collaboration. English is expected to be the lingua franca bridging the communication and integration between native speakers of different mother tongues. However, little research has been done to support this assumption. In this paper we analyzed how integrated language communities are by analyzing the scholars' tweets used in 26 Computer Science conferences over a time span of five years. We found that although English is the most popular language used to tweet during conferences, a significant proportion of people also tweet in other languages. In addition, people who tweet solely in English interact mostly within the same group (English monolinguals), while people who speak other languages interact more with different lingua groups. Finally, we also found higher interaction between people tweeting in different languages. These results suggest a relation between the number of languages a user speaks and their interaction dynamics in online communities.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      HT '15: Proceedings of the 26th ACM Conference on Hypertext & Social Media
      August 2015
      360 pages
      ISBN:9781450333955
      DOI:10.1145/2700171

      Copyright © 2015 ACM

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      Publication History

      • Published: 24 August 2015

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