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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Regular readers of this blog will know that we’ve now examined Twitter activity around a number of recent events in some detail – from the Labor leadership spill in Australian politics in June 2010 through to the subsequent election, to the recent floods in Queensland and beyond. On that basis, we now also in a position to make some comparisons between these events: in the first place, to examine how they unfolded, and how much of the wider Twitter userbase they’ve been able to mobilise.

So, building on the work we’ve already done, and adding a few more case studies into the mix, here’s an overview of activity within selected Twitter #hashtags – in each case, over the course of their most active day. The process is similar in each case: retrieve a full #hashtag archive from Twapperkeeper, run our explodetime.awk Gawk script over the data to identify daily and hourly activity, then pick the 24 hours during which the volume of tweets in the #hashtag was most significant.

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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)…

This post comes as something of a postscript to my four-part series about the key themes of discussion under the #ausvotes hashtag on Twitter during the recent Australian election campaign (17 July to 21 August 2010 – see posts #1, #2, #3, and #4). In addition to looking at the content of those tweets, I also wanted to examine the networks of conversation which took place during that time. This builds on our trusty Twapperkeeper #ausvotes archives from between 17 July and 24 August again.

Those networks are created by Twitter users including @replies, of course – e.g. ‘@snurb_dot_info’ to get my attention. I need to point out two major limitations of looking at @replies in this way, though: first, not all @reply conversations will necessarily continue to include the #ausvotes hashtag in further tweets – one way of describing this is to say that where #ausvotes is missing from follow-up tweets, the users @replying to one another have stepped away from the crowd and begun a more private conversation (though still in a public space, unless they move to direct messaging). What I’m analysing in the following, by contrast, are only public conversations where the #ausvotes hashtag was retained – i.e. where users were talking to (or at) one another, but did so still with the wider #ausvotes audience in mind; we might understand this as a deliberately publicly performed conversation.

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I thought it might be interesting to have a look at the 10 or so most-tweeted links associated with the #ausvotes hashtag for last week (Sunday 25 July-Sunday 1 August). The idea is to use some quite basic data to gain some insights into the media mix associated with the election conversation on Twitter – not only from the perspective of our own individual experiences of that conversation, but far more broadly.

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