Eric is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology. He says of the project: '[It] aims to develop a preliminary model of the relationship between discourse on social media and authentic views held by social media users, based on researching discussions about arts and culture experiences occurring on social media. We will conduct an online ethnography focusing on a small stratified random sample of Twitter users discussing partner arts and culture organisations on Twitter to uncover the relationship between online and offline discourse. The research will be used to develop a new prototype open source sentiment analysis tool for arts and culture discourse, providing a practical test of the initial findings about automated social media analysis. A realistic understanding of the limits of what social media discourse can reveal is essential at this time when such data is widely seen as an unproblematic source of audience insights. The practical implications of the research will be discussed with the two practice partners: Visual Arts Southwest and the University of Cambridge Museums’