Mapping Online Publics

As 2011 winds down (which may also give me the time to do some more Gawk coding again – watch out for more updates soon), we’re still in the process of harvesting the results of our work over the last twelve months. Over the past few weeks, a clutch of articles based on our Mapping Online Publics research have finally seen the light of day:

• I’ve converted my exploration of dynamic @reply network mapping methods (detailed in a series of blog posts starting here) into an article in Information, Communication & Society: “How Long Is a Tweet? Mapping Dynamic Conversation Networks on Twitter Using Gawk and Gephi.” In the article as well as in the original blog posts, I’m using the 2010 Rudd/Gillard Australian Labor Party leadership spill – #spill on Twitter – as a case study.
   

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Well, it has taken me quite some time to get my first post together for the MoP blog, so forgive me if this gets a bit wordy. I have a bit of catching up to do.

First of all, for those who don’t know me, I am a part of the ATN-DAAD collaboration with the team from the Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, regarding methodological innovations in the analysis of data from Twitter.

Axel, Jean and I have been here in Dusseldorf now for several days. Much of the discussion thus far (in advance of the #DIATA workshop on the 15th and 16th of September) has been in relation to our ‘Twitter League’, which we first set up back in July of this year. (You can find more detail of the project here, at Katrin’s blog). Read the rest of this entry →

Some welcome validation of our efforts to understand the use of social media – especially Twitter – during recent natural disasters (a few key posts are collected here) has arrived in the form of a number of submissions to the Australian federal government’s Convergence Review. The Review has the (very broad) remit to “to examine the policy and regulatory frameworks that apply to the converged media and communications landscape in Australia”, an important task not least also against the backdrop of the emerging National Broadband Network and the continuing concerns over highly concentrated ownership structures in Australia’s commercial media industries.

Social media are far from playing a central role in these overall considerations, of course, but their increasing significance as an additional medium for many-to-many communication alongside more established mainstream media is being highlighted by a number of the submissions. Our work is being cited especially by two key submissions.

The first of these is from ex-monopolist telecommunications provider Telstra. It highlights the increased agency of users as content creators, drawing inter alia on my Gatewatching book and my two reports on social media (with Mark Bahnisch) for the Smart Services CRC, and particularly notes the role of user-generated content during the Queensland floods, citing material we published on the CCI Website:

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I’m following up a little further on my post of our first, very tentative and incomplete, map of the Australian Twittersphere, for another slightly more detailed look. First, though – also in response to some of the Twitter comments to the first posting, here’s another clarification of what you’re seeing.

In the first place, the total number of ‘Australian’ (by our criteria) Twitter users we’ve identified so far is about 550,000. Of these, at this point we have data on their follower/followee networks for about 450,000. If we exclude from this group all those users who have fewer than five followers, we’re left with roughly 150,000. So, if you see me use these numbers, that’s where they’re coming from.

The maps I’ve posted display these follower/followee networks based on affinity – those users who are closely interlinked through a range of connections with each other appear close to one another in the network, forming clusters which (we should assume) are determined by shared interests and other shared attributes. From a quick glance at the users involved in these clusters (or at least, at their usernames, which often indicate their interests or backgrounds), this seems to hold true, especially for the most connected users.

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We’ve been neglecting the blog a little – not because there hasn’t been anything worth writing about, but rather because there’s been too much going on. So, before our big trip to Europe in August and September (more on that soon), it’s time to clear the backlog of updates. And what better way to start than with an early map of Australia. No, we’re not talking about ancient seafarers’ maps here (though there are some similarities): part of our aim with the Mapping Online Publics project has always been to develop a better understanding of the Australian Twittersphere – to go beyond the observation of individual hashtag conversations, and to examine the overall network of Australian Twitter users (similar to what we’ve started, and are also continuing, with the Australian blogosphere).

So, over the past few months we’ve worked with our project partners at Sociomantic Labs in Berlin to identify as many Australian Twitter users as we could find, and to trace their networks of followers and followees. The core problem in this is to define what constitutes an Australian user, of course – here, we’ve been relying on a combination of the timezone they’ve set for themselves (e.g. ‘Brisbane, GMT+10’), the location they’ve started in their profile, and other characteristics. This isn’t without its drawbacks, of course – some users may never have set their profile information; some have even deliberately set their details ‘wrongly’ (following the disputed Iranian elections, some users set their timezone to Tehran time, for example, to show sympathy and/or confuse Iranian authorities trying to find the accounts of local dissidents); some use non-standard descriptions of their location (Brisvegas, Brisneyland) or are in Australian cities whose names also occur elsewhere (there’s a Toronto, Texas, and Bolivia here, and any number of suburbs called Paddington). And some users are simply very confused – quite a few users with timezones set to GMT-10 should have chosen GMT+10, and vice versa…

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Tomorrow, our Mapping Online Publics project team is hosting the public research workshop The World According to Twitter at QUT, in collaboration with our visiting researchers Katrin Weller and Cornelius Puschmann from the Junior Researchers Group "Science and the Internet" at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany. The workshop is the first major event in our two ATN-DAAD research projects with colleagues in Düsseldorf and Münster, and should provide a great starting point for a very exciting research programme. We’ve already spent most of the past week in intensive research sharing mode with Katrin and Cornelius, and you’ll see some of the first outcomes of our brainstorming activities appear on this blog soon.

Tomorrow, though, is all about taking stock of where the still very nascent area of Twitter research is at. We’ll be making our contribution to the programme by looking at some of our key outcomes from the past year or so – especially, of course, our work on the use of Twitter in crises like the Queensland floods – as well as giving a first preview of what’s coming up later this year. And the day after tomorrow, we’re presenting a Twitter methods workshop at the Communities & Technologies conference here in Brisbane – more on that soon.

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In a previous post, I explained how to extract links to known image-hosting services from an archive of tweets, and promised to follow up with a substantial post on image-sharing in the Queensland Floods – this is that post. It’s pretty long, but it does have pictures. Here are the main points:

1. During the Queensland Floods, we shared and retweeted a lot of images: more than one in every 5 shared links was to an image hosted on one of several image-sharing services.
2. We overwhelmingly depended on Twitpic and other Twitter-centric image-sharing services to upload and distribute the photographs we took on our smartphones and digital cameras.
3. The patterns of image-sharing over time seem to match the overall patterns in Twitter activity on the same hashtag, with sharp peaks in both uploading and retweeting early on, followed by a significant drop-off.
4. Going beyond Twitter, a side excursion to the ‘other’ image-sharing site, Flickr, raises some questions about the role of such services in public memory – for one thing, we might like to rethink our reliance on the mobile snap-and-upload mode of image sharing.

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Over the past few weeks, as part of the VRES program at QUT, I have been assisting Axel and Jean on their Social Media Mapping project.    The aim of the project is to try to understand the shape and dynamics of online public communication in Australia – focusing on “user created content” such as Blogs, Twitter, Youtube, and Flickr.  My particular role in the program is to assess and categorise the online communication in the Australian Blogosphere.  In doing this, I have begun analysing a list of over 7000 active Australian Blogs and allocating them into categories accordingly.  By the end of this exercise, we will be able to view the category trends in Australian blogging and use this as a comparison against other countries later down the track.

Currently, a few weeks into the program, I have categorised just over 2000 blogs.  However, I think it is important to note how I got to this stage as well as the established categories for feedback purposes.  When first approaching this project, Jean and I worked together through a selection of 100 blogs and established some preliminary categories.  In doing this exercise we came up with 17 categories, planned to be further worked into a succinct and exhaustive list within the coming weeks.  This original list is as follows: Read the rest of this entry →

One more time for the world: there will be a final (I think) presentation for this year of our work around Twitter in the 2010 Australian election, at the International Australian Studies Association ‘Double Vision’ conference in Sydney on Friday. This is something of a ‘best of’ of the material which we’ve already presented here on the blog over the past few months, though I wouldn’t be surprised if we do a little more data-crunching on this corpus again in the future. I’m already posting the slides and abstract below – audio to come later, if all works out with audio now also added.

Though it may not have had a substantial effect on the eventual outcome, Twitter was a highly visible component of the 2010 Australian election coverage. During the campaign, the #ausvotes hashtag alone generated over 400,000 tweets. This paper provides an overview of key trends in Twitter-based discussion of the Australian election.

(Crossposted from snurb.info, where you can find my full coverage of ECREA 2010.)

Hamburg.
My own paper was next at ECREA 2010. Here’s the presentation – and I also recorded the audio for it, and will add it as soon as I can which is now attached to the slides. As it turned out, one of the other presenters in the session also broadcast the whole event to Justin.tv – so go there to see it all in action (my presentation starts around 52 minutes in, and you can also see the other papers on our panel)…