ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on research using individually created documents, such as letters, diaries and their online equivalents. Individually created documents can offer insights into everyday lives that would be hard to obtain using other methods. However, it can be difficult to obtain representative samples of documents. The detailed case study within this chapter aimed to understand how a type of smoking was portrayed on social media. Data was collected from Twitter in relation to waterpipe (also known as shisha, hookah and hubble-bubble) smoking. Both tweets (a form of microblog) and accompanying photos were collected and analysed. The process of generating a research question, pilot data collection and the actual data collection using Twitter’s Application Programming Interface (API) is described. The data was analysed using a simple semiotic analysis, to understand whether tweets were positive, negative or neutral. This was supplemented with an inductive thematic analysis of the content of each tweet to understand the key things people were discussing alongside waterpipe smoking. Furthermore, a content analysis was undertaken of a sub-sample of images that were attached via URL to tweets. The findings of the semiotic analysis of textual content were validated through analysis of the images, showing a high level of similarity. The chapter will also explore the particular challenges of using individually created documents as data and, in particular, examines ethical issues. Additional data is provided to enable readers to practise semiotic analysis of tweets.
