Mapping Online Publics: Researching the Uses of Twitter

Mapping Online Publics:Researching the Uses of Twitter
Assoc. Prof. Axel Bruns
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
a.bruns@qut.edu.au – http://snurb.info/ – @snurb_dot_info
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

Why Twitter?
Researching Twitter:
Significant world-wide social network
~200 million users (but how many active?)
Varied range of uses: from phatic communication to emergency coordination
Healthy third-party ecosystem (for now)
Strong history of user innovation: @replies, #hashtags
Flat and open network structure: non-reciprocal following, public profiles by default
Good API for gathering data for research

(Google Maps)

The 2011 Queensland Floods
Chronology:
December 2010 to January 2011: unprecedented rainfall
Emergency declared for more than 50% of Queensland
Wivenhoe dam reaches 180% capacity
December 2010: Flooding in northern Queensland
January 2011: Floods in southeast Queensland
10 January 2011: flash flooding in Toowoomba
10 January 2011: ‘inland tsunami’ in the Lockyer Valley
11 January 2011: flooding begins in Ipswich
12-16 January 2011: major flooding in Brisbane

(Google Maps)

(ABC News)

(news.com.au)

(ABC News)

Social Media during the Floods
Various platforms:
Facebook, Twitter – updates and information
YouTube, Flickr, Twitpic – first-hand video and photos
Google Maps, Ushahidi – map-based information mashups
Different tools for different purposes
Various levels of maturity:
Uses and use practices still developing
Different demographic reach
Technological differences:
e.g. Facebook: built around personal networks; semi-private; discussion threads
e.g. Twitter: open, flat network; public #hashtag conversations; update stream

#qldfloods Tweets
10 Jan 2011 11 Jan 2011 12 Jan 2011 13 Jan 2011 14 Jan 2011 15 Jan 2011

10 Jan 2011 11 Jan 2011 12 Jan 2011 13 Jan 2011 14 Jan 2011 15 Jan 2011
#qldfloods from Toowoomba to Brisbane

#qldfloods @replies
authorities
mainstream media

@QPSmedia as Central #qldfloods Information Source

#qldfloods Network Map – Most Active Accounts Only(Degree >= 15 / Node size: indegree / node colour: outdegree)

The Queensland Floods Community
Self-organisation:
Rapid establishment of #qldfloodshashtag
Ad hoc development of community structures
Highlighting of leading accounts, vigilant against disruption
Suspension of petty squabbles (e.g. state politics)
Innovation and rapid prototyping:
Adjunct hashtags (#Mythbuster, #bakedrelief)
Sharing and gathering of online resources
Additional tools (Google Maps, Ushahidi Maps)
Emergency services rapidly adopting social media tools (despite lack of established strategies)
 ‘Go where they are’ rather than ‘build it and they will come’

Image by Maproom Systems

New Media and Public Communication: Mapping Australian User-Created Contentin Online Social Networks
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, YouTubeas ‘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– natively digital methods

Data Gathering
yourTwapperkeeper+ in-house crawler
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

Analysis – Twapperkeeper (#hashtags)

But Why?
Possible research questions:
Ad hoc events and publics:
How do online publics form and dissolve? How do they interact, what structures do they form?
Where do they draw information from? What do they share?
Do they simply consist of the usual suspects? How insular and disconnected are online publics?
Hashtags in context:
How do different hashtag events compare? Are there common types of hashtags/publics?
How ‘big’ are they? What topics attract attention on Twitter?
What community (?) structures emerge?

#royalwedding

Hashtag Publics, Hashtag Metrics
How big is the central core of users?
Long tail distribution: most active users responsible for the majority of content
90/9/1 rule: how much does the top 1% of users contribute?
#royalwedding: ~10% of all tweets
#qldfloods: ~17% of all tweets
#libya: ~49% of all tweets
What do they do: inform, share, chat?
How many links to they share?
How much retweeting do they do (edited/unedited)?
How many @replies do they send / receive?
… etc.

Tweets by Top 1% of Contributors

Distinguishing Apples and Oranges
(top 1% most active users in each hashtag; size = percentage of total tweet volume)
Top 1% most active users

Distinguishing Apples and Oranges
All contributors

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

http://mappingonlinepublics.net/
@snurb_dot_info
@jeanburgess

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Mapping Online Publics: Researching the Uses of Twitter

by Axel Bruns on Sep 01, 2011

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Mapping Online Publics: Researching the Uses of Twitter — Webinar Transcript