Abstract:

Twitter celebrates its 10th anniversary this year and it has rapidly become part of our everyday language; hashtags are everywhere, from the menu at your local restaurant to the evening news. But - exactly how has Twitter impacted our culture and the way we use language? Can we better understand communication on Twitter in order to help people use the platform for effectively? We set out to explore Twitter's relationship with language to break down the barriers to communicating on the platform; a key challenge for our users. In this presentation we describe how we designed semiotic research to uncover insight in big data sets, how we used big data to streamline the qualitative process, and how we paired the two to provide actionable insights for teams across our organisation.