Social Media Article Visualizer Project

Social Media Article Visualizer Project Social Media Article Visualizer Project This projects goal is to create a visualizer for social media articles, offering technical communication researchers a new way to map, understand, and use interdisciplinary articles on social media. Verzosa Hurley and Kimme Hea (2014) argue that we see continued critical study of social media as integral to [technical communication]. Technical communicators have taken up this call and investigated social media from many angles. However, technical communication is a naturally interdisciplinary field, and it does not seem that we are reading very interdisciplinarily when it comes to social media. Verzosa Hurley and Kimme Heas article cites no journals outside writing studies when talking about the social media topic of reach, despite prior articles in other fields on the topic, including two in Journal of Medical Internet Research (Mackey & Liang, 2013; Ramo & Prochaska, 2012). In a CDQ article, Hopton and Parry (2016) discuss the use of social media in a nonprofit. They cite Public Relations Review (2 articles), Journal of Computer Mediated Communication (2 articles), and Journal of Social Marketing (1 article) as journal articles of other disciplines out of their 31 sources. Articles from specially tailored journals such as Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly or large journals like New Media and Society could connect TC with the most up-to-date research on nonprofit use of social media. I do not see this state of affairs as a failure of the authors, but as a difficulty of technological/academic systems: I argue that many articles on social media are published in journals spread across fields that are not indexed in our disciplinary journal databases. I expect that other fields do not cite our work in social media for the same reason. Being able to quickly find cutting-edge research from multiple fields could allow researchers in technical communication and all fields to stay up-to-date on research about social media topics and not reinvent the wheel through similar studies. Furthermore, current databases often return results in list format, which makes understanding the whole shape and geography of social media research on a topic difficult. Understanding visually where certain types of social media research are published could allow researchers to make different types of connections between research than a list format may allow. I am proposing a tool that aims to accomplish those goals.