1. 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/
2. 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’
3. New Media and Public Communication: Mapping Australian User-Created Content in Online Social Networks Bruns, Burgess, Kirchhoff & Nicolai http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ 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.
4. #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
5. #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?
6. 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
16. 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?
17. 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
18. 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
19. The Australian Twittersphere Follower/followee network:~150,000 Australian Twitter users(of ~550,000 known accounts so far) colour = outdegree, size = indegree