# Citizen Science on Twitter: Using Data Analytics to Understand Conversations and Networks
## 8 Discussions
In this paper, we have presented an overview of the variety of discussions that emerge on social media within the citizen science community. Using a variety of methods (exploratory analysis, social network analysis and topic modelling) on a large scale social dataset, we have analysed what content is sharedon social media and how social media communities are structured around topics related to citizen science. In particular, we answer our research questions as follows:  
_RQ1. What are the predominant topical discussions around the citizen science microblogging communities?_  
From the study conducted in Sections 4 and 6, we have observed a wide variety of topics that fall within the scope of citizen science. Wider topics such as blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralisation indicate many conversations around emerging technologies. We have also encountered much discussion around current news, politics, citizen science activities, events as well as crowdfunding. We summarise our findings as a way of addressing the RQ1 as our observations of the citizen science community discussions largely around the following themes:  
* Discussions on citizen science projects, platforms, organisations, personal appeals and courses. * Citizens and organisations sharing (ecological) observations. * Sharing news and current affairs on politics and public policy. * Sharing examples where crowdsourcing has made an impact. * Discussions on emerging topics such as bitcoin, blockchain, decentralization, data. We also note that there are several studies where citizens are engaged on social media to share their observations around different topics [16]. We also note that the role of social media as an information and news dissemination medium is well-established, and a large segment of different populations rely on social media as a source for their daily news [71]. Our observations showcasing how social media is used for storytelling and share positive examples of applications of citizen science and crowdsourcing could also help capture new audiences and increase engagement [79]. While topical analysis of social media content can help identify emerging themes and topics [80] (a common application of research being in event detection [81]), it was interesting to observe the citizen science community discuss topics that are highly topical. Our observations also indicate the use of social media as a mechanism for broadcasting and advertising projects, platforms, personal appeals and so on [82]. _RQ2. What networks facilitate the spread of citizen science information within microblogging communities?_  
Visualising the network in graph layouts helped us observe three types of communities that had emerged:  
* Large number of users connected to a handful of users via few connections discussing topics in isolation;
* large number of larger clusters that appear in isolation and not engaging with other clusters;
* a heavy core with very strong internal connections. As our study is the first of its nature on citizen science conversations on Twitter, we believe it is interesting to observe different networks created as a result of communication exchange in conversations. The role of influencers in broadcasting information to large numbers of users, thereby increasing engagement with wider networks is already established [83]. Within our study, we noticed this role being played by organisations, research projects and citizen science portals. Several networks are built around retweets that support the promotion of a central idea. While this insight into the different types of networks may not be that surprising given the nature of social media, it is important to note that there are a number of users who constitute a very strong central network. Such users can be immensely valuable in sharing citizen science results, eventually helping engage with a wide range of audiences [84]. _RQ3.