Mapping Online Publics

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:

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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:

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

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.

Read the rest of this entry →

Ten days ago I posted a quick overview of the relative frequency with which Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott were mentioned by name in #ausvotes tweets (and ‘by name’ here includes mentions of their first and/or last names, as well as of their Twitter account names). What the data showed at that point was a very slight lean towards Abbott on most days, but mainly on low-traffic days – as I said then, Gillard tended to ‘win’ the high-volume days on Twitter. And overall, the tally was almost dead even: 10769:10540 mentions in favour of Gillard.

I thought it might be worth doing an update to cover the last week and a half, too. Here’s how things currently stand:

Read the rest of this entry →

In my article for the National Times the other week, I mentioned how in the election campaign week before the leaders’ debate the @juliagillard Twitter account got around three times as many @replies as the @tonyabbottmhr one. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I suggested that this may be because people would rather tweet the likely winner (to support or criticise her positions) than talk to the loser – but of course there could be many other explanations, too.

Anyway, this got me thinking: what’s the overall visibility of both leaders in the Twitter stream – not just in terms of @replies, but in terms of overall mentions? How has this changed over time, as the campaign unfolded? With Abbott’s chances of beating Gillard now seriously firming, is there any discernible change in these patterns?

Read the rest of this entry →