The questioning lens as research tool: the social shaping of network visualisation boundaries in the case of the UK junior doctors’ contract dispute

ABSTRACT

Social media and the data it produces lend itself to being visualised as a network. Individual Twitter users can be represented as nodes and retweeted by another Twitter user, thereby forming a relationship, an edge, between users. However, an unbounded network is a sprawling mass of nodes and edges. Boundary settings are typically applied, for example, a time period, a hashtag, a keyword search or a network substructure of a phenomenon of interest. Thus, the particular visualisation created is dependent upon the boundaries applied, enabling productive visual consumption, but concealing its social shaping. To explore this question of boundary setting and its associated issues, we draw on an example from the Twitter discussions about the UK Minister for Health, Jeremy Hunt, and the media debate surrounding the contractual hours of junior doctors during 2015–2016. We discuss the role and impact differing stakeholders have in setting these boundaries. We seek to provide a set of ‘questioning lenses’ in which we ask why these boundary settings were selected, what effect they have, and what are the potential implications of these boundary setting techniques on the visualisation consumer.

KEYWORDS:

• Information visualisation
• social network analysis
• medical sociology
• data analytics

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Professor Stephen Payne from the University of Bath for his advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sian Joel-Edgar is a post-doctoral academic at Bath University, researching business visualisations. Previously she has worked in the Innovation and Service Research group at Exeter University Business School, and as a Research Fellow at the Tampere University of Technology, Pori, Finland. Sian’s research interests are Social Network Analysis, business visualisations to support decision-making and innovation, and requirements capturing for software design [email: [email protected]]. Sian Joel-Edgar is also currently working in the School of Computing and Communications at the Open University and can be emailed at [email protected].

Ingrid Holme is a medical sociologist with over 10 years’ experience in public health and Science and Technology Studies. She holds a BSc Biotechnology from the University of Leeds, an MSc in Science and Technology Studies from Amsterdam University, and a PhD in Sociology from Egenis at Exeter University. Her research interests concern how people use information and knowledge, from understandings of genetics to ideas of belonging [email: [email protected]].

Dr Heli Aramo-Immonen is Associate Professor in Marketing at Örebro University, Visiting Senior Lecturer at Bath University, and Honorary Research Fellow at Exeter University. She has a professional background from export industry. Her research interests include knowledge management, with a specific focus on organisational learning and strategy building, and innovation management recently focused on utilisation of social media in B2B knowledge transfer. Heli has more than 60 publications in international journals and conferences, books and book chapters [email: [email protected]].