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Researchers Serial Hashtag Activism: An M.T. Bastos Ethnographic Embedment of Big Principal Investigator Data Prof. Dr. Manfred Faßler Project Term M.T. Bastos and Prof. Dr. Manfred Faßler 2015 - 2015 Project Areas Social and Cultural Anthropology, Non-European Cultures, Jewish Studies and Religious Studies Clusters LOEWE CSC Cluster Frankfurt Institute Institut für Kulturanthropologie und Europäische Ethnologie University Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main Introduction In this investigation we describe a population of politically- charged social media users we call serial activists. We mined 20M tweets related to nearly 200 instances of political protest between 2009 and 2013 and identified a network of users tweeting across geographically distant protest hashtags. We resorted to statistical disambiguation to describe the characteristics of this group, which have an ordinary following but bridge disparate language communities and facilitate collective action by virtue of their dedication to a cause. After exploring how serial activists deviate from traditional forms of political activism, we report on a series of in-depth, semi- structured interviews held with 21 such activists. The material was thematically-coded to provide a typology of serial activists and their struggles with institutionalized power, political activism, and social media in the context of political turmoil. This research provides a bridge to the qualitative-quantitative gap in the social sciences by resorting to an ethnographic embedment of big data observations in the lifeworld of political activists. Reference [1] Bastos, M. T., & Mercea, D. (in press). Serial Activists: Political Twitter beyond Influentials and the Twittertariat. New Media & Society. [2] Bastos, M. T., Mercea, D., & Charpentier, A. (2015). Tents, Tweets, and Events: The Interplay Between Ongoing Protests and Social Media. Journal of Communication, 65 (2), 320-350. printed 29. Sep 2021 - 22:40 https://www.hkhlr.de/projects/236 page 1 of 2 Serial Hashtag Activism: An Ethnographic Embedment of Big Data M.T. Bastos and Prof. Dr. Manfred Faßler [3] Bastos, M. T., Recuero, R., & Zago, G. (2014). Taking tweets to the streets: A spatial analysis of the Vinegar Protests in Brazil. First Monday, 19 (3). Last Update: 2020-11-12 18:53 printed 29. Sep 2021 - 22:40 https://www.hkhlr.de/projects/236 page 2 of 2 Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org).

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