TY - JOUR
T1 - #EngineersWeek
T2 - 125th ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition
AU - Malik, Aqdas
AU - Johri, Aditya
AU - Karbasian, Habib
AU - Handa, Rajat
AU - Purohit, Hemant
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© American Society for Engineering Education, 2018.
PY - 2018/6/23
Y1 - 2018/6/23
N2 - Community engagement efforts have become an important avenue for raising public interest and know-how related to engineering. These efforts draw the young and the diverse into seeing engineering as a worthwhile profession. One such effort at the national level in the U.S. is the "National Engineers Week". This is a week-long celebration held every February that consists of numerous events and activities organized for the general public with a focus towards students, women, and under-represented groups. In this paper, we examined this effort through the lens of social media and analyzed Twitter data collected for two hashtags used during the National Engineers Week 2017: "#eweek2017" and "#engineersweek". Our dataset consisted of 6,583 original tweets and 10,885 retweets. To study the impact of the outreach we used three analytical approaches: descriptive analysis, content analysis, and network analysis. We found that the Twitter campaign participation was dominated by engineering companies and individual users followed by a limited participation of educational institutions, professional engineering associations, and non-profits. As opposed to other popular hashtag campaigns, not a single news media organization was identified as a participating user signaling a lower new media-driven propagation of the campaign among the public. From a content perspective, the tweets can be categorized as event promotion, showcasing employees of engineering companies, or encouraging and inspiring public (especially women and children) towards engineering. With the growing popularity of social media, community engagement efforts need to strategically leverage hashtags and other media elements for a broader impact.
AB - Community engagement efforts have become an important avenue for raising public interest and know-how related to engineering. These efforts draw the young and the diverse into seeing engineering as a worthwhile profession. One such effort at the national level in the U.S. is the "National Engineers Week". This is a week-long celebration held every February that consists of numerous events and activities organized for the general public with a focus towards students, women, and under-represented groups. In this paper, we examined this effort through the lens of social media and analyzed Twitter data collected for two hashtags used during the National Engineers Week 2017: "#eweek2017" and "#engineersweek". Our dataset consisted of 6,583 original tweets and 10,885 retweets. To study the impact of the outreach we used three analytical approaches: descriptive analysis, content analysis, and network analysis. We found that the Twitter campaign participation was dominated by engineering companies and individual users followed by a limited participation of educational institutions, professional engineering associations, and non-profits. As opposed to other popular hashtag campaigns, not a single news media organization was identified as a participating user signaling a lower new media-driven propagation of the campaign among the public. From a content perspective, the tweets can be categorized as event promotion, showcasing employees of engineering companies, or encouraging and inspiring public (especially women and children) towards engineering. With the growing popularity of social media, community engagement efforts need to strategically leverage hashtags and other media elements for a broader impact.
KW - Big data analytics
KW - Content analysis
KW - National engineers week
KW - STEM
KW - Social media
KW - Social network analysis
KW - Twitter
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85051187846&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85051187846&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference article
AN - SCOPUS:85051187846
SN - 2153-5965
VL - 2018-June
JO - ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings
JF - ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition, Conference Proceedings
Y2 - 23 June 2018 through 27 December 2018
ER -