Methodology

Because of the small time scale for this work I decided to place certain restrictions on my ethnography. I knew I wanted to focus on the Torchwood fan community on Twitter because of the impassioned responses and comments that I had access to during that week when I was watching Series 3 and looking for sympathy and comfort from that fan community. Torchwood fans are dotted throughout the social web and it would certainly be interesting to look at a wider group but I wanted to focus in specifically on how interactions on Twitter took place and whether such interactions could genuinely form or reveal personal connections that could be classed as a community.

Even restricting the Torchwood community to Twitter I needed to refine the period of study to something manageable and useful. I would have very much liked to study the period during which I had originally found #Torchwood Twitter activity but there were two reasons why this was not possible: firstly Twitter only maintain access/searchability for recent Tweets (a few weeks or 2-3 months at most) although they retain all Tweets beyond this date; and secondly this week of frenzied Twitter activity involved so many participants and interactions (particularly because it was a Trending topic) that it would be difficult and far too large in scale to observe and understand.

Eventually I decided to focus in on a short period of activity and on Thursday 29^th October I posted a message for “Follow Friday” requesting suggestions of Torchwood Tweeters to follow (see below) with my hope being that this might alert me to specific recommended members of the #Torchwood community around whose activity I could base my ethnography and/or with whom I might be able to make contact.

I received no replies to this Tweet I decided that the best approach was to follow and record (via TwapperKeeper) 24 hours of Tweets on the #Torchwood hashtag that could then be looked at to investigate a better sense of who and how members of the community interacted.

Having observed the community for 24 hours I started looking at the public connections between Twitter profiles, the biographical information and links made to other sites and generally to look around the public information provided by, and linked to, by Participant Tweeters. My reasoning for doing so was to allow me to find out more about the community by exploring the information they share with each other, as suggested in Hine (2004 quoted in Clari (unpublished)) where one of her ten principles for virtual ethnography is:

“4. Instead of going to particular field sites, virtual ethnography follows field connections.”

Exploring profiles and linked personal websites allowed me to start to look at the role of official/brand images in the community, the role of fan practices amongst hashtag participants, the importance of promotion and sharing to this hashtag and the role that Twitter-specific measures of authenticity played in developing a sense of trust about postings made by specific users to #Torchwood. I will look at connections and personal authenticity and influence in the #Torchwood Tweeps section of this ethnography.

Finally I have been drawing and thinking about my observations of #Torchwood and the use of Twitter hashtags as a focus for communities. This is included in the Observations section of this site.

Ethics of this Ethnography

I decided to keep the ethics fairly simple to manage here and chose to look only at public postings marked with the #Torchwood hashtag. These posts are all in the public domain and information about participants is entirely drawn from their public profiles. I did not, aside from my Follow Friday post, ask for permission to use this material. I am aware there is some risk in this approach (e.g. the backlash described in Walker (2005)) but both the character and subject of postings did not seem sensitive enough to warrant any further form of informed consent being required. Twitter is also recognized as a public sharing mechanism (unless a protected account is used) making use of Tweets relatively uncontroversial, however in making ephemeral posts become preserved as images and quotes I am, perhaps. pushing the boundaries of acceptable use.

In order to protect the privacy of Tweeters I did not Google given names/usernames or seek out any website that was not linked to. Most participants linked to some sort of personal site but some had sparse profiles without links. DrWhoNews, the most prolific Tweeter, does not link to a website but does publish regular links and so I followed these publicly published links in order to find out more about this particular participant.

Assessment and Format

During the preparations for this work I was very taken with a quote from Richardson (2000) on assesment as blogged by Debarra (2009). The criteria suggests five areas for consideration:

"1. Substantive Contribution: “Does the piece contribute to our understanding of social-life?”

2. Aesthetic Merit: “Does this piece succeed aesthetically?”

3. Reflexivity: “How did the author come to write this text…Is there adequate self-awareness and self-exposure for the reader to make judgments about the point of view?”

4. Impact: “Does this affect me? Emotionally? Intellectually?” Does it move me?

5. Expresses a Reality: “Does it seem ‘true’—a credible account of a cultural, social, individual, or communal sense of the ‘real’?”

Where these criteria from some of the ethnography theory and practice described in Hine (2000) is in the general nature and scalability of the criteria and the flexibility with which they can be applied. Long term or large scale ethnographies warrant both a proportionately detailed methodology and more specific assessment criteria but for this short project, and the novel nature of the field site – if a Twitter hashtag can really be referred to in that way – Richardson's concise headings seem apt and attainable and I am very grateful to Damien for making me aware of them.

In observing participation around the #Torchwood hashtag, and then looking at the problem of how to represent the #Torchwood Twitter community in my ethnography, I continually battled with the question of proving that this set of interactions was genuinely an ethnographically valid community and I felt Richardson's aesthetic criterion was particularly interesting here. I have therefore attempted to provide visual ways to access the community interactions as well as links back to the original Tweets and exchanges. It is hard to give an idea of Twitters real-time character as so many different applications access Twitter and it is difficult to replicate the effect of seeing Tweets come in without creating a 24 hour video. Instead the next section represents the tweets as, effectively, a slideshow of Tweets in the order they were posted.