What people study when they study Tumblr. Classifying Tumblr-related academic research
| Date | 08 May 2017 |
| Published date | 08 May 2017 |
| Pages | 528-554 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-08-2016-0101 |
| Author | Rose Attu,Melissa Terras |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Records management & preservation,Document management,Classification & cataloguing,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Scholarly communications/publishing,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management,Information & communications technology,Internet |
What people study when they
study Tumblr
Classifying Tumblr-related academic research
Rose Attu and Melissa Terras
Department of Information Studies, University College London, London, UK
Abstract
Purpose –Since its launch in 2007, research has been carried out on the popular social networking website
Tumblr. The purpose of this paper is to identify published Tumblr-based research, classify it to understand
approaches and methods, and provide methodological recommendations for others.
Design/methodology/approach –Research regarding Tumblr was identified. Following a review of the
literature, a classification scheme was adapted and applied, to understand research focus. Papers were
quantitatively classified using open coded content analysis of method, subject, approach, and topic.
Findings –The majority of published work relating to Tumblr concentrates on conceptual issues, followed
by aspects of the messages sent. This has evolved over time. Perceived benefits are the platform’s long-form
text posts, ability to track tags, and the multimodal nature of the platform. Severe research limitations are
caused by the lack of demographic, geo-spatial, and temporal metadata attached to individual posts, the
limited Advanced Programming Interface, restricted access to data, and the large amounts of ephemeral posts
on the site.
Research limitations/implications –This study focusses on Tumblr: the applicability of the approach to
other media is not considered. The authors focus on published research and conference papers: there will be
book content which was not found using the method. Tumblr as a platform has falling user numbers which
may be of concern to researchers.
Practical implications –The authors identify practical barriers to research on the Tumblr platform
including lack of metadata and access to big data, explaining why Tumblr is not as popular as Twitter in
academic studies.
Social implications –This paper highlights the breadth of topics covered by social media researchers,
which allows us to understand popular online platforms.
Originality/value –There has not yet been an overarching study to look at the methods and purpose of
those who study Tumblr. The authors identify Tumblr-related research papers from the first appearing in
2011 July until 2015 July. The classification derived here provides a framework that can be used to analyse
social media research, and in which to position Tumblr-related work, with recommendations on benefits and
limitations of the platform for researchers.
Keywords Research methods, Classification, Twitter, Content analysis, Social network analysis, Blog,
Microblogging, Keyword analysis, Social network systems, Tumblr
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Since its launch in 2007, the social media website Tumblr (www.tumblr.com) has become an
incredibly popular platform which hosts over 308.9 million blogs containing 137.9 billion
entries, claiming a current rate of 45.6 million daily posts (Tumblr, 2016b). In 2015, one in ten
online adults worldwide used Tumblr (Duggan, 2015). In spite of its popularity, Tumblr has
been described as the “forgotten”(Anderson, 2015, p. 156) social network when compared to
the fellow major platforms Facebook (www.facebook.com) and Twitter (www.twitter.com),
which have inspired vast amounts of published academic research (Wilson et al., 2012;
Williams et al., 2013). This paper sets out to evaluate and classify the research produced
regarding Tumblr that is published in English, using a framework we developed to
categorise Twitter-based research outputs (Williams et al., 2013). Published research on
Tumblr has expanded in a wide variety of disciplines, and this paper aims to provide an
in-depth identification, analysis, and classification of the academic literature, identifying
61 research outputs which have been published before 2015 July. This paper determines
Journal of Documentation
Vol. 73 No. 3, 2017
pp. 528-554
© Emerald PublishingLimited
0022-0418
DOI 10.1108/JD-08-2016-0101
Received 10 August 2016
Revised 15 December 2016
Accepted 15 December 2016
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/0022-0418.htm
528
JD
73,3
research focus on Tumblr, and methodologies applied in the course of academic analysis.
We also investigate which subject matters and research methods have risen to prominence,
and trace Tumblr’s shift from occupying the periphery of research activity concerned with
social media trends, to its positioning at the centre of a series of academic outputs.
Published literature on Tumblr remains very scarce. By compiling and analysing
our corpus of 61 full academic papers and devising a classification of the research
undertaken thus far, this study contributes to the understanding of Tumblr as a research
subject, and by extension, to the study of social media and microblogging –a variant of
blogging that describes online social network services providing a range of features to allow
users to share, exchange, and interact with short posts and messages (Ross et al., 2011).
We show that the majority of papers published have a conceptual focus: explaining how
Tumblr works in when positioned within a specific field of interest, closely followed by
message-based works which study Tumblr content. User studies have become more
popular. There are surprisingly few technological approaches to analysing Tumblr content
by automation or scale. We identify the core aspects of Tumblr which have proved
attractive to researchers (including long-form text posts, tagging structures, multimodality,
and means for ethnographic research), and the features which are problematic when
undertaking research on the platform including: processing abandoned blogs; the
vast amount of content (which can be inconsistent and ephemeral); the lack of access to
large-scale data from the site; and the recent fall in Tumblr’s popularity. We identify why
there are fewer research outputs produced regarding the site compared to its main social
media competitors, despite its large user base.
This paper therefore provides a useful overview for future work on Tumblr, and will be
of value to researchers wanting to familiarise themselves with the existing literature, those
wishing to compare other social media research to that carried out on the platform,
those wishing to learn more about the affordances of the platform for the research
community, and those wishing to have examples of how the study of social media can
inform us of current societal trends.
Understanding Tumblr
Tumblr is a rich resource for researchers to exploit. Since its launch in February 2007, it has
provided a free hosting platform for short blogs with a minimal set up. Tumblr blogs have
always been “unlocked”by default, making posts visible to any online user in possession of
a free account. Unlike the limited 140 character length text posts which have come to define
the microblogging site Twitter, Tumblr most closely resembles a traditional blogging
platform in its support for long-form text posts, allowing for text entries (its normal posting
format) of varying character lengths[1]. It also hosts six other specially formatted post
types: images (categorised as “photo”), videos, website links, chat transcripts, quotes, and
audio files. Tumblr enables its users to interact with others through the creation of follower
networks, leading to the growth of innumerable virtual communities. There are several
different levels of interaction at play, as users can send each other special “Fan Mail”
messages and ask questions. Users can follow other Tumblr blogs, track subjects based on
tags, and “reblog”and “like”other users’content to show appreciation or participate in
conversations. Reblogging allows posts to appear on user’s own Tumblr page, where they
may choose to add their own comments or tags; these operate in a similar method to
hashtags on Twitter (Ross et al., 2011). Up to 30 tags can be applied to each post, and users
can conduct searches based on the first 20 (Unwrapping Tumblr, 2015). All the posts created
or reblogged by a user, and all the posts made by the users they are following, are also
displayed internally on the “dashboard”page: a continually updating stream of content
representing each Tumblr user’s tastes.
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Classifying
Tumblr-related
academic
research
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