My interests include understanding how it is that people interpret the information that their network connections (e.g. friends, followers, etc.) post within social media environments including Twitter, Mendeley, Reddit, and Facebook. How is it that one’s audience understands when something that you have posted to social media is a joke or it is to be taken seriously? How do social media participants understand when their “friends” are speaking from the perspective of their professional lives or their personal lives? How do social media users learn how to make use of features (affordances) within socio-technical ecosystems to assist their audience with correctly interpreting a tweet or post? These issues are of particular interest to me when considering academics and social media use as the more traditional boundaries of personal and professional have become blurred.

I have developed a socio-technical framework combining Erving Goffman‘s Frame Analysis (1974) and Impression Management (1959) frameworks and J.J. Gibson‘s (1977) affordance concept in my dissertation in order to examine how people understand what is going on in computer-mediated communication contexts. I’m currently using this framework to examine scholarly communication on Twitter and other social media environments. My work contributes to discourse in scholarly communication, scientometrics, altmetrics, and social theory by analyzing personal and professional communication made by scholars. I’m also working on several other altmetrics related studies including comparing publication activity and Twitter activity, scholar’s self-presentation in social media environments, and the consumption and dissemination of scholarly work in social and popular media environments.

Location

Turku, Finland

Disciplines

• Information Science and Technology

Affiliation

Indiana University

Website

http://www.tdbowman.com