Mapping Online Publics on Twitter

Mapping Online Publics on Twitter
Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Queensland University of Technology
Brisbane, Australia
a.bruns / je.burgess@qut.edu.au
@snurb_dot_info / @jeanburgess
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

Social Media Research in the CCI
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation (national, based at QUT)
Project: Media Ecologies & Methodological Innovation
With Journalism & Media Research Centre (JMRC) @ UNSW
Aims to implement new methods to understand the changing media environment;
Focusing on the relationship between social media and traditional media and communication platforms;
Combining large-scale computer-assisted techniques with qualitative social research and close textual analysis
Focus on Crisis Communication
Natural disasters
Other ‘acute events’

New Media and Public Communication: Mapping Australian User-Created Content in Online Social Networks
Bruns, Burgess, Kirchhoff & Nicolai
Australian Research Council (ARC): Discovery Project (2010-13) – $410,000
QUT (Brisbane), Sociomantic Labs (Berlin)
First comprehensive study of Australian social media use.
Computer-assisted cultural analysis: tracking, mapping, analysing blogs, twitter, flickr, youtube as ‘networked publics’
Builds on previous work of the research team (UCC, YouTube, blogosphere mapping)
Advances beyond established approaches - beyond political blogospheres, beyond snapshots
Addressing the problem of scale (‘Big Data’) and disciplinary change in media, cultural and communication studies.

#hashtags on Twitter
Hashtag =‘#’ + alphanumeric characters:
Automatic tracking & aggregation of a topic, represented with a hyperlink
Originally a (lead) user innovation, later integrated into platform
Simple, adaptive and generative
Can coordinate, render visible, and constitute publics

#hashtag Publics
Publics:
Attend to matters of shared concern with some level of co-awareness
Varied in intensity and temporality
Emergent, constituted via discourse & affect
#hashtag publics:
Not all hashtags constitute publics; Twitter doesn’t ‘contain’ publics
What are the various patterns in the dynamics of different hashtag-based publics?
What might account for these differences?

Data Gathering
yourTwapperkeeper: API-based data capture
Data Processing
Gawk – open source, multiplatform, programmable command-line tool for processing CSV documents
Textual Analysis
Leximancer – commercial (University of Queensland), multiplatform: extracts key concepts from large corpora of text, examines and visualises concept co-occurrence
WordStat – commercial, PC-only text analysis tool; generates concept co-occurrence data that can be exported for visualisation
Visualisation
Gephi – open source, multiplatform network visualisation tool
Tools for Researching Twitter

#ausvotes (July-Aug. 2010)

#royalwedding (29 Apr. 2011)

#eqnz (Feb./Mar. 2011)

#qldfloods: @QPSmedia (Jan. 2011)

#ausvotes: Leaders

#ausvotes: Themes

#spill (23 June 2010)

#GoBackSBS (June/July 2011)

Comparative Metrics

Towards a Typology of Twitter Uses
How are hashtags used (during acute events)?
Gatewatching:
Finding and sharing information about breaking news (before the mainstream media do?)
Ad hoc publics: many URLs, many retweets (even unedited)
Audiencing:
Shared experience of major (foreseen) events
Imagined community of fellow participants: few URLs, limited retweeting
What other uses are there?
Continuing discussions (#auspol, #bundesliga, …)
Memes (#ghettohurricanenames, …)
Emotive hashtags (#fail, #win, #headdesk, …)
What about keywords?

Beyond Hashtags
Publics on Twitter:
Micro: @reply and retweet conversations
Meso: hashtag ‘communities’
Macro: follower/followee networks
 Multiple overlapping publics / networks
What drives their formation and dissipation?
How do they interact and interweave?
How are they interleaved with the wider media ecology?
Twitter doesn’t contain publics: publics transcend Twitter

Understanding Australian Twitter Use
What is the Australian Twitteruserbase?
Large-scale snowballing project
Starting from selected hashtag communities (e.g. #ausvotes, #qldfloods, #masterchef)
Identifying participating users, testing for ‘Australianness’:
Timezone setting, location information, profile information
Retrieving follower/followee information for each account (very slow)
Progress update:
~550,000 Australian users identified so far

The Australian Twittersphere
Follower/followee network:~150,000 Australian Twitter users(of ~550,000 known accounts so far) colour = outdegree, size = indegree

The Australian Twittersphere

@snurb_dot_info
@jeanburgess

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Mapping Online Publics on Twitter

by Axel Bruns on Sep 13, 2011

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Mapping Online Publics on Twitter — Webinar Transcript