New Methodologies for Researching News Discussion on Twitter

New Methodologies for Researching News Discussion 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/

Why Twitter?
Researching news discussion on Twitter:
Significant world-wide social network
~200 million users (but how many active?)
Varied range of uses: from phatic communication to emergency coordination
Flat and open network structure: non-reciprocal following, public profiles by default
Commonly used in the coverage and discussion of breaking news events and ongoing stories
Good API for data journalism

Twitter and the News
Key news-related uses of Twitter:
First-hand news reports:
Emergency landing in the Hudson; Abbottabad raid; storms, earthquakes, tsunamis
Continuing news discussion:
Information sharing (gatewatching); commentary; story curation through hashtags
‘Ambient’ news coverage (Hermida; Burns):
Early indicator of breaking stories; trending topics, themes, URLs, etc.
 Tool for sourcing, tracking, finding stories

#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

#hashtags in Context?
Follower/followee network:~150,000 Australian Twitter users(of ~550,000 known accounts so far) colour = outdegree, size = indegree

Data Journalism (Research) beyond Twitter
Data journalism is a growing field
Data journalism research necessary to inform both journalism theory and practice
Twitter is a key news space now, and needs to be further researched
Other social media may come to replace it, but many methods will remain similar
Potential to generate new insights well beyond journalism itself: popular sentiment and interests, communication, culture, …
Many tools available, but more methods work necessary!

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

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http://twitter.com	3
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New Methodologies for Researching News Discussion on Twitter

by Axel Bruns

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