Mapping the Australian Twittersphere

Jean Burgess & Axel Bruns@jeanburgess @snurb_dot_infohttp://mappingonlinepublics.net/ Queensland University of Technology

NEW MEDIA AND PUBLIC COMMUNICATION: MAPPING AUSTRALIAN USER-CREATED CONTENT

IN 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, YouTube as ‘networked publics’– Motivated by media, communication & cultural studies’ concerns; combining

quantitative analytics with qualitative analysis

‘BIG DATA’ & INTERNET RESEARCH

• Big Data as currency across the sciences and social sciences• Business intelligence & ‘data markets’ (including social media &

online behavioral data).• ‘Computational turn’ in new humanities research: shift from

computational tools to a new computational paradigm, changing the ontologies and epistemologies of humanities research (Berry, 2012).

• Eg shift from ‘close’ to ‘distant’ reading (Moretti); ‘software studies’ (eg Fuller, 2008) and ANT approaches to new media platforms;

• From ‘virtual’/trad social research methods to ‘natively’ digital methods to diagnose patterns of social change (Rogers, 2009).

• Data Gathering– yourTwapperkeeper + in-house crawler– Reliant on Twitter API

• Data Processing– Custom Gawk scripts – open source, multiplatform,

programmable command-line tool for processing CSV documents

• Analytics & Visualisation– Gephi – open source, multiplatform network visualisation tool– MS Excel – comparative metrics, coding

A TWITTER RESEARCH TOOLKIT

#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

• #hashtags– ‘#’ + keyword makes tweets easily discoverable and marks themes– E.g. #ausvotes, #qldfloods, #mit8, #swag, #nofilter, …

• #hashtag publics– Not all hashtags constitute publics; hashtags don’t represent the sum of

engagement with these topics on Twitter; Twitter doesn’t ‘contain’ publics– What are the patterns in the dynamics of different hashtag-based publics?– What might account for these differences?

#QLDFLOODS TWEETS

10 Jan 2011 11 Jan 2011 12 Jan 2011 13 Jan 2011 14 Jan 2011 15 Jan 2011

#AUSVOTES: LEADERS

#QLDFLOODS @REPLIES

mainstream media

authorities

#AUSPOL (FEB.-DEC. 2011)

TOWARDS COMPARATIVE METRICS

MAPPING THE AUSTRALIAN TWITTERSPHERE

• Snowballing: what is the Australian user-base?• Starting from selected hashtag communities in 2010

(e.g. #ausvotes, #qldfloods, #masterchef)• Identifying participating accounts, testing for ‘Australianness’:

• Timezone setting, location information, profile information

• Retrieving follower/followee information for each account (very slow)

• Progress update (end 2012):• ~1.06 million Australian accounts identified so far• ~2 million Australian accounts in total?

DISCLAIMERS

The map is not the territory (Korzybski)

…and certainly not the destination

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

PerthMarketing / PR

DesignWeb

Creative

FarmingAgriculture

HardlineConservatives

ConservativesJournalists

ALPProgressives

Greens

News

OpinionNews

NGOsSocial Policy

ITTech

Social MediaTechPR

Advertising

Real EstateProperty

JobsHR

Business

BusinessProperty

Parenting

Mums CraftArts

FoodWine

Beer

Adelaide

SocialICTs

CreativeDesign

FashionBeauty

UtilitiesServices

Net Culture

BooksLiteraturePublishing

Film

TheatreArts

RadioTV Music

DanceHip Hop

Triple J

TalkbackBreakfast TVCelebritiesCycling

Union

NRL

Football

CricketAFL

SwimmingV8s

Evangelicals

Teachinge-Learning

Schools

ChristiansHillsong

Teens

Jonas Bros.Beliebers

Australian Bands

@KRuddMP

@JuliaGillard

#AUSPOL

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

#AUSVOTES

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

#QLDFLOODS

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

#EQNZ

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

#ROYALWEDDING

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

#MASTERCHEF

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

ABC.NET.AU URLS

URLs for Feb 2013Follower/followee network:~120,000 Australian Twitter users(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012) colour = tweets with URLs, size = indegree

NEWS.COM.AU URLS

URLs for Feb 2013Follower/followee network:~120,000 Australian Twitter users(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012) colour = tweets with URLs, size = indegree

http://mappingonlinepublics.net/