Mapping Online Publics

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll have seen some of the work on the use of Twitter in the Australian election that we’ve started to do. That’s part of our wider research into mapping Australian online publics which will examine interactions across blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr well beyond the immediately political realm, which we’re undertaking as part of an ARC Discovery project, and in the context of our work researching our changing media ecologies in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), based in Brisbane, Australia.

To further extend this work, we’re now calling for expressions of interests in postgraduate research within the CCI. Within the CCI, there’s a very broad range of research opportunities, and we encourage you to have a look through all of them, even if network mapping isn’t your specific interest – undertaking your PhD at the CCI means you will be working with world class researchers who can offer supervision of the highest standards. Our research activities cover a broad range of emerging issues, themes and projects across the entertainment and creative industries including innovation and policy development; significant project collaborations with Asia; a major project looking at broadband services; mapping the creative industries; IP law; a global cultural futures study and other projects which engage community and industry partners in creative industries from major film studios to the Salvation Army and ‘at-risk’ young people working as media co-creators. visit the CCI Projects Page at http://www.cci.edu.au/projects to find out more about the Centre’s activities.

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And finally, following on from where we left off in Part 3 of this series, let’s have a look at some of the key themes of this election campaign, such as they were. Again, this builds on the keywords and key phrases we identified using WordStat in Part 2: from those stats we can extract and cluster a number of themes which bear further attention.

Let’s begin with actual policies: from the WordStat data, five policy fields emerge as having been of major interest to #ausvotes commenters during the campaign – national broadband policy (most centrally, the choice between Labor’s NBN scheme and the Coalition’s alternative broadband proposal); the ‘Cleanfeed’ Internet filter pursued by Labor communications minister Stephen Conroy; climate change; asylum seekers; and same-sex marriage. It’s probably no surprise that of these, two are very clearly identified as topics of interest to heavy Internet users – an indication, not least, that the Twitterati whose content we’re analysing here are unlikely to be representative for the wider Australian population. So, let’s have a look at what we find:

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Having looked (in Part 2 of this series of posts) at the overall keyword and key phrase trends in the over 400,000 #ausvotes tweets discussing the Australian federal election, we’re now in a position to chart the prominence of key themes across the five weeks between 17 July and 24 August 2010. There are quite a number of potential themes to track here, so I won’t combine them all into a single graph – rather, I’ll group them into a number of (hopefully) fairly sensible clusters.

First, a little light relief: since we’ve already looked at the relative number of mentions of each leader by name (in Part 1), let’s extend this and examine mentions of their nicknames and catchphrases. For PM Julia Gillard, the catchcry was – especially in the early stages of the campaign – the interminably repeated phrase ‘moving forward’, while Opposition Leader Tony Abbott encouraged Australians to ‘stand up for real action’. Additionally, after Gillard ditched her overly controlled campaign, she promised to let the ‘real Julia’ come to the fore, while inadvertently also bestowing the nickname ‘Mr. Rabbit’ on Abbott, as a result of her pronunciation of her opponent’s name.

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So, on to part two of our examination of trends and patterns on the #ausvotes Twitter hashtag during the 2010 Australian federal election campaign. (Part 1 is here.)

In the following posts, I’ll be interested to chart the rise and fall of specific themes during the five weeks of campaigning that we’re examining here, and to do so I’ll largely follow the approach I’ve used in Part 1 for charting the volume of mentions of the two leaders in #ausvotes tweets. But to get there, we need to work out what were key themes during the campaign, at least as far as coverage on Twitter was concerned. To get a clearer picture of that, I’ve run the more than 400,000 #ausvotes tweets we’ve captured through Twapperkeeper through the content analysis software WordStat, which provides an overview of both individual keywords and multi-word key phrases found in the data. Here are the top 50 results for each:

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Okay. A week and a half have passed since the Australian federal election on 21 August, and we’re still none the wiser about who will form the next government (though it’s worth mentioning in passing that it’s blatantly wrong to claim that Australia currently has no government – however dramatic the headlines, they’re simply incorrect). Anyway, while we’re waiting: time enough to work through the more than 400,000 tweets accumulated under the #ausvotes Twitter hashtag between 17 July (when PM Julia Gillard called the election) and the election weekend of 21 August, and to examine what the patterns of activity on #ausvotes might tell us about the shifting preoccupations of the Twitterati during and after the campaign. As before, my data come from Twapperkeeper, this time covering the period of 17 July to 24 August 2010.

There’s plenty to look at here, so I’ll split this post into a number of sections, examining various aspects of the #ausvotes coverage. A quick overview to start us off (as always, click to expand): while there was substantial tweeting activity throughout the campaign, things ramped up significantly towards the tail end, and went through the roof on election Saturday, with a whopping 94910 #ausvotes tweets that day. And the preceding Friday and following Sunday were the next biggest days of the entire period: Friday clocked up 21875 tweets, while 35050 tweets attempted an early analysis of the results on Sunday.

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So, just over 24 hours to go until the polls close and counting begins in the election we had to have – and I thought it was time again to have a look at how mentions of the two leaders in tweets tagged with the #ausvotes hashtag are shaping up.

You’ll remember that Gillard was leading this contest ever so slightly on 2 August (10769:10540), and that Abbott had pulled ahead 27097:24163 by 12 August. And that lead has blown out further over the past few days – as of midnight on 19 August, Tony Abbott is leading Julia Gillard by a whopping 41088:33071! For whatever reason, #ausvotes Twitterers have been mentioning Abbott a whole lot more than Gillard over the past week.

No doubt what’s going on here is more than just simple endorsement – rather, as a gradual narrowing in the opinion polls is being reported, this may well be a sign of increased discussion about what the election of an Abbott government may mean for Australia. Perhaps (and that’s still a big perhaps) what we’re seeing here is a sign of incumbency: however little time Gillard herself has had in the top job, after the last three years, a Labor government is a relatively known quantity, while it’s still unclear what a Coalition government may do in the future.

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The other day I had a look at Twitter’s response to the Australian political leaders’ appearances on ABC1’s citizen forum-style show Q&A – by looking at the #qanda hashtag. My last post focussed especially on the commentary about Julia Gillard’s performance – today, it’s Tony Abbott’s turn.

First, though: in comparing the volume of tweets across the two programmes I noted that the Twapperkeeper archive for Tony Abbott’s appearance had a number of crucial gaps – for several periods of up to ten minutes at a time, we’re simply missing tweets altogether. I’ve checked this with the good folks at Twapperkeeper, and I’m afraid the response is that there’s nothing that can be done to retrieve those tweets now – so we’ll have to make do with what we’ve got. In that light, I’ve re-done the side-by-side comparison of tweeting activity in response to both leaders, and – for illustration only – added in a ‘moving average’ trendline to extrapolate what volume we might have seen during those gaps in the Abbott tweetstream.

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By popular demand, here’s part one of a first quick take on how Australia’s major political leaders fared with their appearances on the ABC’s Q&A programme, in the eyes of the (surprisingly massive) Twitter audience that Q&A manages to generate – for both of their appearances this week (Tony Abbott) and last (Julia Gillard), the #qanda hashtag became a globally trending topic.

Let’s begin with some baseline data (provided, once again, by Twapperkeeper): here’s the total amount of tweets before, during, and after the screening of Q&A on ABC1, hour by hour.

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As we head into the last week before the Australian federal election, here’s a quick update to my last post where I collected together the most-tweeted YouTube videos out of the #ausvotes Twapperkeeper archive so far. That post only took us up to Friday 6 August – which is centuries ago in election time.

Last week (Sunday 8 Aug to Saturday 15 Aug) saw a few breakthrough hits, especially the ABC’s Gruen Nation fake pro-Greens ad produced by Republic of Everything; some snippets of Sky news coverage; and the usual retweets of official campaign ads. Note that the reasonably popular Time Warp spoof (the ALP’s attempt at a ‘viral’ video) seems to have been pulled by YouTube due to alleged copyright infringement, but as of now it’s still up on Vimeo. Results follow below.

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Update: this analysis covers a few less days than I originally stated – the results should look quite different once we add in this week’s links (and next week’s!).

Here are the top 20 Australian election-related YouTube videos so far up to last Friday morning, according to the Twitterati. Or to be more precise, here are the 20 videos which have been linked to the most in tweets containing the #ausvotes hashtag posted between 17 July and 6 August, according to the Twapperkeeper archive.

Couple of interesting things to note:

• the mismatches between the Twitter link rankings of some of these videos with the number of views they have received on YouTube;
• the low numbers of links generally (could be a glitch with the scripts, but I’m reasonably confident it isn’t)
• the reasonably solid performance of ‘made-for-web’ comedy videos performed and/or produced by professionals
• the high retweet value of ‘official’ campaign videos (in which I’d probably count GetUp!) – although it’s important to note that the tweets that go alongside the videos are frequently less-than flattering…
• and if I may add a personal note, the only mild sharpness or funniness of even the sharpest and funniest of these videos…

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