Trends on #ausvotes during the Australian Election, Pt. 2

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:

 
Note: I’ve removed various meaningless or overly generic terms from these lists. For the keywords, this includes ‘bit’ and ‘ly’ (from URL shortener bit.ly), ‘party’, ‘Australia(n)’ (which both have too many possible meanings to be useful), ‘seat’, ‘make’, ‘day’, ‘today’, ‘won’, ‘question’, etc.; for the key phrases, this includes ‘vote/voted/voting for’, ‘has/have/had been’, ‘time to’, ‘lot of’, ‘election is’, ‘watch the’, ‘Australia has/had/have’, ‘sound/sounds/sounded like’, ‘live/lives/lived in’, ‘listen to’, ‘make a’, ‘form a’, etc. While such removals are necessary to focus on the most meaningful content, they do also remove some potential meaningful data – perhaps most notably, any mentions of the newspaper The Australian, whose name contains not one but two ‘generic’ words. Unfortunately, short of engaging in extensive manual coding of the data (which, with 400,000 tweets, I’m not keen on), there’s simply no way to reliably distinguish between ‘the Australian’ meaning ‘The Australian’ and other uses in phrases such as ‘the Australian people’, ‘the Australian government’, ‘the Australian election’. Also worth noting: WordStat tends to reduce words to their basic form – so ‘Abbott say’ is most likely ‘Abbott says’, ‘Sky new’ is actually ‘Sky News’, etc.

Some immediate observations from these lists: as we’ve seen in Part 1, mentions of Abbott win out over mentions of Gillard, whichever way we slice the data. Part 1 presented cumulative totals on the number of tweets which mentioned any of the words ‘Tony’, ‘Abbot’, ‘Julia’, or ‘Gillard’, but even if we narrow those criteria to mentions only of ‘Abbott’ (in the correct spelling) vs. ‘Gillard’, or ‘Tony Abbott’ (as a complete phrase) vs. ‘Julia Gillard’, Abbott comes out on top.

Against this, however, we should also note that where mentions of their respective parties are concerned, the balance is reversed. ‘Labor’ (28114) and ‘ALP’ (15089) rank more highly than ‘Liberal’ (11896), ‘Coalition’ (9415), or ‘Libs’ (7423), and the Queensland version ‘LNP’ appears only in 3108 tweets (I’m not counting ‘National’ here, since the word could both refer to the National Party or be used in any number of other, unrelated contexts). This could be a sign of the complex multi-party structure of the Coalition (combining Liberals, Nationals, LNP, Country Liberal Party, etc.), but even adding up the numbers above the Labor side wins 43203:31842 over the Coalition, so there is a sustained trend here. And again, as with the leaders, the volume of tweets does not imply agreement or disagreement with their political positions, of course – it merely indicates the Twitterati’s overall level of attention. And while ‘Green’ also appears prominently in the list of keywords, a little caution is indicated: in addition to referring to the Australian Greens, it could also have been used in mentions of the ABC’s election analyst Antony Green!

At any rate, in combination these lists of the most tweeted terms and phrases point us to a number of worthwhile trends to chart over the course of the entire campaign period. Some of them we can already assume to be late entrants: the idea of a hung parliament, or the focus on Wyatt Roy (the successful 20-year-old Liberal candidate) and on Bob Katter (the independent MP who now finds himself amongst a handful of independents holding the balance of power) are more than likely to be phenomena to emerge on election night and in its immediate aftermath; Katter and Roy in particular were not major themes during the preceding capaign. Others we would assume to have been more persistent throughout the five weeks – discussion of the two parties’ national broadband plans, of Labor’s Internet filter agenda, of policies on asylum seekers or climate change were all prominent at various stages of the electioneering process. So, over the next couple of posts, I’ll chart these in some more detail.