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With a focus on how social media users discuss different places in discourses surrounding urban policy, this book applies a novel theoretical framework to large-scale Twitter discourses in order to reveal the spatial patterns and inequalities of social media discourses.

Public spheres research has traditionally sidestepped questions of space by focusing on a priori delineated political territories, most prominently national public spheres. While this approach has always lacked nuance, it has become acutely insufficient nowadays, as digital communication technologies easily enable a host of heterogeneous actors to draw public attention to spaces and places at any scale, and communicatively connect places anywhere in the world. This conceptual article argues that communication scholars need to reconsider the spaces embedded in the content of public discourses. Drawing on the notion of issue publics, it understands the public definition of issues as inextricably linked to the places that are communicatively associated with them, causing issue spaces to emerge. The issue space is constructed through place-naming whenever public actors reference places in the context of issues. The article develops issue spatiality as an analytical framework to understand the role of place and space in public discourse. It discusses how issue spatiality enables a better understanding of the increasingly complex scales of public communication, and outlines several dimensions of issue spatiality. Drawing on communication infrastructure literature, it proposes socio-spatial inequalities of communicative resources as important predictors of issue spatiality, along with the habits of professional communicators, and local problem properties. Gazetteers and mapping techniques are introduced as methodological interventions required for the empirical use of issue spatiality.

Public spheres research has traditionally sidestepped questions of space by focusing on a priori delineated political territories, most prominently national public spheres. While this approach has always lacked nuance, it has become acutely insufficient nowadays, as digital communication technologies easily enable a host of heterogeneous actors to draw public attention to spaces and places at any scale, and communicatively connect places anywhere in the world. This conceptual article argues that communication scholars need to reconsider the spaces embedded in the content of public discourses. Drawing on the notion of issue publics, it understands the public definition of issues as inextricably linked to the places that are communicatively associated with them, causing issue spaces to emerge. The issue space is constructed through place-naming whenever public actors reference places in the context of issues. The article develops issue spatiality as an analytical framework to understand the role of place and space in public discourse. It discusses how issue spatiality enables a better understanding of the increasingly complex scales of public communication, and outlines several dimensions of issue spatiality. Drawing on communication infrastructure literature, it proposes socio-spatial inequalities of communicative resources as important predictors of issue spatiality, along with the habits of professional communicators, and local problem properties. Gazetteers and mapping techniques are introduced as methodological interventions required for the empirical use of issue spatiality.

Public spheres research has traditionally sidestepped questions of space by focusing on a priori delineated political territories, most prominently national public spheres. While this approach has always lacked nuance, it has become acutely insufficient nowadays, as digital communication technologies easily enable a host of heterogeneous actors to draw public attention to spaces and places at any scale, and communicatively connect places anywhere in the world. This conceptual article argues that communication scholars need to reconsider the spaces embedded in the content of public discourses. Drawing on the notion of issue publics, it understands the public definition of issues as inextricably linked to the places that are communicatively associated with them, causing issue spaces to emerge. The issue space is constructed through place-naming whenever public actors reference places in the context of issues. The article develops issue spatiality as an analytical framework to understand the role of place and space in public discourse. It discusses how issue spatiality enables a better understanding of the increasingly complex scales of public communication, and outlines several dimensions of issue spatiality. Drawing on communication infrastructure literature, it proposes socio-spatial inequalities of communicative resources as important predictors of issue spatiality, along with the habits of professional communicators, and local problem properties. Gazetteers and mapping techniques are introduced as methodological interventions required for the empirical use of issue spatiality.

This article investigates the role of social media in scale shift of contention. Contentious politics research grapples with questions of scale shift, while digital activism explores connective potential of social media. Yet, the potential of social media is not fully explored in the scale shift processes. We conduct an explorative semantic network analysis to understand how activists create connections between contentious places to facilitate spatial and substantive scale shift. We define contentious places as places bearing demands and grievances on themselves, expressed with hashtags and connected via co-hashtagging practices. We employ the notion of hybridity to understand the role of online and offline dynamics in this process. Our results show that social media enables connections within and across borders, and across issues, hence expanding contention spatially and substantively.

In this study, we theoretically conceptualize and empirically investigate translocal spatial arrangements of networked public spheres on social media. In digital communication networks, actors easily connect with others globally, crossing the borders of cities, nations and languages. However, the spatial notions evoked in public sphere research to date remain largely territorial. We propose a theoretical framework drawing on Löw's sociology of space, which highlights the relational and translocal nature of spatial arrangements. In a case study of the translocal interaction network of Berlin Twitter users, we demonstrate how this framework can be leveraged empirically using network analysis. Despite the overall network of Berlin's Twittersphere spanning the whole world, we find territorialized as well as deterritorialized translocal communities. This points to the simultaneity of territorial and networked spatial logics in digital public spheres.

While scholarly attention has been devoted to social media's potential mobilizing function, they may also contribute to demobilization discourses: social communication actively promoting nonvoting. This paper examines discourses around mobilization vs. demobilization in the context of the municipal elections in Jerusalem. As the sweeping majority of East Jerusalem Palestinians have continuously been boycotting Jerusalem's municipal elections, this is a potent case through which to examine how demobilization functions in action, through social media conversations. Using a mixed-methods analysis of Twitter contents as structured by different languages, our findings show how mobilization and demobilization discourses can co-occur during the same election event. Users of different languages - reflecting different social and political identities - interpret the elections in contrasting ways, with tangible implications for (in)equality in political participation. The study thus contributes theoretically to several domains of political communication, including election studies, local politics, and language fragmentation in online political discourse.

Kernstück jeder Inhaltsanalyse ist ein Kategoriensystem, das häufig induktiv-qualitativ an einer kleinen Stichprobe von Texten entwickelt wird. Methoden des Text Mining ermöglichen es heute, eine nahezu unbegrenzte Anzahl an Texten effizient, schnell und nachvollziehbar zu explorieren. In diesem Beitrag wird ein Verfahren vorgeschlagen, bei dem solche Methoden eingesetzt werden, um induktiv aus einem umfangreichen Textkorpus Kategorien für eine Inhaltsanalyse zu bilden. Diese Methoden werden mit einer qualitativen, manuellen Inhaltsanalyse kombiniert. Die Kombination verschiedener Verfahren besteht darin, dass zunächst mittels Text Mining thematische Oberkategorien aus einem vorliegenden Textkorpus extrahiert, anschließend manuell validiert und in einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse um Unterkategorien erweitert wurden. Das Vorgehen wird beispielhaft an einem Codebuch erläutert, welches im Rahmen der Auswertung des "Bürgerdialogs" der Bundesregierung "Gut leben in Deutschland" zum Thema Lebensqualität entwickelt und angewendet wurde. ; At the core of every content analysis is a codebook of relevant categories, frequently developed qualitatively based on a small sample of texts. Currently text mining methods enable us to explore an almost unlimited number of texts in an efficient, fast, and comprehensible manner. In this article, we suggest a procedure for codebook development using these methods to inductively derive coding categories from a large text corpus for content analysis. These methods are combined with qualitative, manual content analysis. First, we derive thematic main categories from a text corpus via text mining. In a next step, we then manually validate these categories and add sub-categories via qualitative content analysis. The method is exemplified with a codebook that was developed for the analysis of the citizen dialog on the "Quality of Life in Germany" [Gut leben in Deutschland], an open-ended questionnaire initiated by the German government to gather citizens' opinions on important aspects of ...

Kernstück jeder Inhaltsanalyse ist ein Kategoriensystem, das häufig induktiv-qualitativ an einer kleinen Stichprobe von Texten entwickelt wird. Methoden des Text Mining ermöglichen es heute, eine nahezu unbegrenzte Anzahl an Texten effizient, schnell und nachvollziehbar zu explorieren. In diesem Beitrag wird ein Verfahren vorgeschlagen, bei dem solche Methoden eingesetzt werden, um induktiv aus einem umfangreichen Textkorpus Kategorien für eine Inhaltsanalyse zu bilden. Diese Methoden werden mit einer qualitativen, manuellen Inhaltsanalyse kombiniert. Die Kombination verschiedener Verfahren besteht darin, dass zunächst mittels Text Mining thematische Oberkategorien aus einem vorliegenden Textkorpus extrahiert, anschließend manuell validiert und in einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse um Unterkategorien erweitert wurden. Das Vorgehen wird beispielhaft an einem Codebuch erläutert, welches im Rahmen der Auswertung des "Bürgerdialogs" der Bundesregierung "Gut leben in Deutschland" zum Thema Lebensqualität entwickelt und angewendet wurde.

Our international research team was in the midst of a comparative study about the day-to-day experience of Twitter users in Berlin and Jerusalem through a series of daily short surveys, when our Jerusalem data were becoming increasingly "compromised" by the growing public concern, and tightening government measures, around the spread of the Coronavirus in Israel. During the two waves of our 10-day survey of salient Twitter users in Jerusalem (March 9-March 19,N = 34; March 23-April 2, N = 25), Israel shifted from 50 confirmed Coronavirus cases to over 6,800 and from relative routine to almost full stay-at-home orders. This essay presents two intersecting narratives. First, we consider the methodological challenges of adapting ongoing academic survey studies to changing conditions. We then offer a mixed-methods analysis of the experiences of our Twitter users and how they saw the Coronavirus crisis shaping their use of Twitter. The essay thus offers a unique methodological and empirical vantage point on how social media use-and academic research-evolve during times of global uncertainty.

Our international research team was in the midst of a comparative study about the day-to-day experience of Twitter users in Berlin and Jerusalem through a series of daily short surveys, when our Jerusalem data were becoming increasingly "compromised" by the growing public concern, and tightening government measures, around the spread of the Coronavirus in Israel. During the two waves of our 10-day survey of salient Twitter users in Jerusalem (March 9–March 19, N = 34; March 23–April 2, N = 25), Israel shifted from 50 confirmed Coronavirus cases to over 6,800 and from relative routine to almost full stay-at-home orders. This essay presents two intersecting narratives. First, we consider the methodological challenges of adapting ongoing academic survey studies to changing conditions. We then offer a mixed-methods analysis of the experiences of our Twitter users and how they saw the Coronavirus crisis shaping their use of Twitter. The essay thus offers a unique methodological and empirical vantage point on how social media use—and academic research—evolve during times of global uncertainty.