Tracking Social Media Participation: New Approaches to Studying User-Generated Content

Tracking Social Media Participation: New Approaches to Studying User-Generated Content Dr Axel Bruns Associate Professor ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation Queensland University of Technology [email_address] http://snurb.info/ – @snurb_dot_info

Researching Social Media
Social Media:
Websites which build on Web 2.0 technologies to provide space for in-depth social interaction, community formation, and the tackling of collaborative projects.
Axel Bruns and Mark Bahnisch. " Social Drivers behind Growing Consumer Participation in User-Led Content Generation: Volume 1 - State of the Art. " Sydney: Smart Services CRC, 2009.

Researching Social Media
Various existing research approaches:
Qualitative:
Processes and practices How? What?
Content generated by users What?
Sites and organisational structures How? In what context?
Quantitative:
User surveys (demographics, practices, motivations) Who? Why?
Content coding (usually small-scale) What?
Mostly small-scale – limited applicability?

Known (Un)knowns
What we know:
Behaviour of small social media communities
Practices of lead users
Structural frameworks for selected sites / site genres
Broad demographics of social media users
Some things we want to know:
How does all of this work at scale?
What about ‘average’ users?
How do communities overlap / interact?
Can we track developments over time?

( Kelly & Etling, 2009 )

Mining and Mapping
New research materials:
Massive amounts of data and metadata generated by social media
Mostly freely available online (Web / RSS / API access)
Clear, standardised formats
New research tools:
Network crawlers
Website scrapers
Network analysers / visualisers
Large-scale text analysers

Network Crawling and Analysis
E.g. IssueCrawler :

Text Scraping and Analysis
E.g. Leximancer :

( Kelly & Etling, 2009 )

Asking Sophisticated Questions
What timeframe?
Crawler approach: anything posted in the last 20 years
Resulting in one static map – but what’s happening now ?
What map?
Other ways to categorise these sites?
Differences in activity, consistency
Known unknowns – dynamics in the Iranian blogosphere:
Sites appearing / disappearing?
Increased / decreased activity?
New linkage patterns:
Stronger / weaker clustering?
Move from one cluster to another?
Change in topics, shift in emphasis, spread of information?

Asking Sophisticated Questions
Problems with current research approaches:
Crawlers don’t distinguish site genres or link types
Scrapers gather all text (including headers, footers, comments, …)
Very few attempts to trace the dynamics of participation
Many different ways to visualise these data
Assumptions often built into the software, and difficult to change
Alternative approaches:
Gather large population of RSS feeds (and keep growing it)
Track for new posts, and scrape posts only (retain timestamp)
Extract links and keywords for further analysis
Develop ways of identifying and visualising change over time
Needs to be appropriate to research questions

Applications: Blogosphere
Questions:
(How) does the ‘A-List’ change over time?
(How) does political alignment change over time?
How strong is cross- connection across clusters?
What topics are discussed – e.g. compared with MSM?
What happens when power ( Adamic & Glance, 2005 ) changes hands – is blogging an oppositional practice?
Beyond left and right (beyond politics!): identification of blog genres based on textual / linkage patterns (qualitative follow-up necessary)

MSM Patterns of Activity (Jan.-Aug. 2009) Bushfires Budget Artefact Qld Election Utegate Pt. 2?

Blog Patterns of Activity (Jan.-Aug. 2009) Bushfires Budget Artefact Qld Election Obama Utegate Pt. 1 Utegate Pt. 2

Opinion Patterns of Activity (Jan.-Aug. 2009) Australia Day Budget Qld Election Obama Utegate Pt. 2 Artefact

Utegate in the Australian Blogosphere 19-24 June 2009 19 June 2009: Opposition Senator Abetz reads from alleged email from PM advisor to Grech during Senate enquiry 19 June 2009: Turnbull accuses Rudd of corruption and lying to parliament 22 June 2009: Federal Police raid Grech’s house and find email 22 June 2009: Email found to be fake, created by Grech

Utegate in the Australian Blogosphere 4-5 August 2009 4 Aug. 2009: Grech admits forging email 4 Aug. 2009: Auditor-General’s report finds no wrongdoing by PM or Treasurer Acknowledgements: Data gathering and processing by Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai (Sociomantic Labs, Berlin) Concept maps by Tim Highfield (QUT) (Preliminary stage for ARC Discovery project, 2010-12)

Applications: last.fm vs. Billboard
Tracking listening patterns:
Billboard = sales charts
last.fm = listening activity
Comparing sales and use of new releases
Identifying brief flashes and slow burners
Distinguishing casual listeners and committed fan groups
Providing market information to the music industry
( Adjei & Holland-Cunz, 2008 )

Application: Wikipedia Content Dynamics
Tracking editing patterns:
Identifying stable/unstable content in Wikipedia
Highlighting controversy, vandalism, sneaky edits
Tracking consensus development
Tracking responses to developing stories ( http://www.research.ibm.com/visual/projects/history_flow/capitalism1.htm )
Establishing trustworthiness based ( http://trust.cse.ucsc.edu/ ) on extent of peer review
Highlighting most hotly debated (edited) sections of text

For More Ideas: VisualComplexity.com

_______ Science Emerges
Web Science Research Initiative (Tim Berners-Lee et al .)
Science, technology, computer engineering, …
Limited inclusion of media, cultural, and communication studies
Strong focus on Semantic Web, artificial ontologies
Cultural Science + Cultural Science Journal (John Hartley et al .)
Media & cultural studies, evolutionary economics, anthropology, …
Limited inclusion of computer sciences, technology
Strong focus on culture, innovation, evolutionary dynamics
Data mining and visualisation
Substantial commercial work on data mining
Visualisation experiments in communication design and visual arts

Looking Ahead
Critical, interdisciplinary approaches
Need to better connect cultural studies, computer science, research technology developments
Need to interrogate in-built assumptions of existing technologies
Need to explore and investigate visualisation and analysis methods
Need to develop cross-platform approaches and connect with more conventional research
Open questions
Ethics of working with technically public, but notionally private data
Potential (ab)use of data mining techniques and/or research results by corporate and government interests
What new knowledge can such research contribute?

Where do you want to go from here?

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Tracking Social Media Participation: New Approaches to Studying User-Generated Content

by Axel Bruns on Oct 27, 2009

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