Paper presented at Digital Humanities Australasia 2012, Canberra, 30 Mar. 2012.

1. Mapping the
Australian Twittersphere
Assoc. Prof. Axel Bruns, Dr. Jean Burgess
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
a.bruns@qut.edu.au – @snurb_dot_info / je.burgess@qut.edu.au - @jeanburgess
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/
Dr. Lars Kirchhoff, Dr. Thomas Nicolai
Sociomantic Labs, Berlin, Germany
http://sociomantic.com/
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

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

3. New Media and Public Communication:
Mapping Australian User-Created Content
in Online Social Networks
o Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project (2010-
13) – $410,000
o QUT (Brisbane), Sociomantic Labs (Berlin)
o First comprehensive study of Australian social media use
o Computer-assisted cultural analysis: tracking, mapping,
analysing blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube as ‘networked publics’
o Builds on previous work of the research team (UCC, YouTube,
blogosphere mapping)
o Advances beyond established approaches – beyond political
blogospheres, beyond snapshots
o Addressing the problem of scale (‘Big Data’) and disciplinary
change in media, cultural and communication studies – natively
digital methods
o Studying society with the Internet (Richard Rogers)
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

4. #hashtag Publics
o #hashtags
o ‘#’ + keyword makes tweets easily discoverable and marks themes
o E.g. #ausvotes, #qldvotes, #qldfloods, #fail, #headdesk, #facepalmer
o Publics
o Attend to matters of shared concern with some level of co-awareness
o Varied in intensity and temporality
o Emergent, constituted via discourse & affect
o #hashtag publics
o Not all hashtags constitute publics; Twitter doesn’t ‘contain’ publics
o What are the various patterns in the dynamics of different hashtag-based
publics?
o What might account for these differences?
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

5. #ausvotes: Leaders
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

6. #qldfloods Tweets
10 Jan 2011 11 Jan 2011 12 Jan 2011 13 Jan 2011 14 Jan 2011 15 Jan 2011
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

7. Towards Comparative Metrics
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

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

9. Understanding Australian Twitter Use
o What is the Australian Twitter userbase?
o Large-scale snowballing project
o Starting from selected hashtag communities
(e.g. #ausvotes, #qldfloods, #masterchef)
o Identifying participating users, testing for ‘Australianness’:
o Timezone setting, location information, profile information
o Retrieving follower/followee information for each account
(very slow)
o Progress update:
o ~950,000 Australian users identified so far, ~21m connections
 ~2 million Australian users in total?
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

10. The Australian Twittersphere?
Follower/followee network:
~150,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~550,000 known accounts by mid-2011)
colour = outdegree, size = indegree
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

11. The Australian Twittersphere?
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = outdegree, size = indegree

12. Real Estate
Jobs
Property
HR
Business
Parenting
Thematic Clusters
Design
Business
Property
Mums Craft
Arts
Web Social Media
Creative Tech Food
Perth PR Wine
Marketing / PR Advertising
IT
Beer
Tech
Creative
Social
Design
ICTs
NGOs Fashion
Utilities
Farming Social Policy Beauty
Services
Agriculture Net Culture
Adelaide
Opinion Books Theatre
Greens News Literature Film Arts
Publishing
ALP
Hardline Progressives
News @KRuddMP
Conservatives
@JuliaGillard Radio
Conservatives TV Music
Journalists Triple J
Talkback
Dance
Breakfast TV
Hip Hop
Cycling Celebrities
Union
Evangelicals Swimming
NRL V8s
Football Teens
Christians
Cricket Teaching Hillsong
AFL e-Learning
Schools Jonas Bros.
Beliebers

13. Automatic Cluster Detection
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = clusters, size = indegree

14. Automatic Cluster Detection
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = clusters, size = indegree

15. #Hashtag Participation
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
size = indegree

16. #auspol
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #auspol tweets, size = indegree

17. #ausvotes
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #ausvotes tweets, size = indegree

18. #wikileaks
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #wikileaks tweets, size = indegree

19. #qldfloods
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #qldfloods tweets, size = indegree

20. #eqnz
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #eqnz tweets, size = indegree

21. #egypt
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #egypt tweets, size = indegree

22. #aflgf
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #aflgf tweets, size = indegree

23. #nrlgf
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #nrlgf tweets, size = indegree

24. #masterchef
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #masterchef tweets, size = indeg.

25. #eurovision
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #eurovision tweets, size = indegree

26. #royalwedding
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #royalwedding tweets, size = indeg.

27. theaustralian.com.au URLs
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = tweets with URLs, size = indegree

28. abc.net.au URLs
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = tweets with URLs, size = indegree

29. ABC accounts
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
blue: official, red: personal ABC accounts

30. Understanding Twitter Publics
o #hashtags:
o Useful coordinating mechanism for core discussion
o Relatively easy to capture and analyse
o Fails to capture non-hashtagged tweets about the topic
o Good case studies, but very little comparative work to date
o National / global Twittersphere maps
o Crucial contextual baseline for #hashtag case studies
o Slow and laborious data gathering process, never complete
o Very long-term perspective, beyond most funded projects
o Indispensable for study of Twitter as a public space
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

31. ‘Big Data’ and the Digital Humanities
o Emerging needs in Twitter research:
o Unified, compatible methods and metrics for Twitter analysis
 Tools and approaches shared at http://mappingonlinepublics.net/
o Powerful infrastructure for long-term, high-volume tracking of
Australian public communication on Twitter
 Data access requires substantial funding stream
o Facilities for long-term data storage and preservation
 Key roles for National Library, National Archives
o Integration with related datasets (e.g. MSM content)
 Need to address data interoperability questions
o Twitter as a test case for digital humanities research
o Widespread, open, public platform for everyday communication
o Tool for observing society at scale through Internet research
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

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