Mapping Online Publics

It’s difficult to believe that one year ago, significant parts of Brisbane were inundated by floodwaters; thankfully, there has been no repeat of the flood crisis this year. One of the few good news stories to emerge from the disaster was the – overall, very successful – way in which social media such as Twitter and Facebook were used during the event, both by key emergency authorities and by everyday users, from directly affected local residents to onlookers further afield.

Particular kudos in this must go to the Queensland Police Service Media Unit, which – not quite from a standing start, but certainly without much time to prepare a comprehensive strategy for its social media crisis communication approaches – delivered timely, informative, and level-headed updates on the flood crisis as it unfolded. Its Facebook followers grew, literally overnight, by a factor of ten, and @QPSMedia also became the single most visible account participating in the #qldfloods Twitter hashtag.

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This morning the Australian Research Council announced the latest round of major grant funding, and I’m pleased to be able to report some very good news. Along with our CCI colleagues Kate Crawford and Terry Flew, Axel and I were awarded funding for a Linkage Project on the uses of social media for crisis communication, which we’ll conduct in partnership with the Queensland Department of Community Safety, Brisbane-based public policy think tank Eidos Institute, and our colleagues at Sociomantic Labs:

Social Media in Times of Crisis: Learning from Recent Natural Disasters to Improve Future Strategies

Recent Australian and international natural disasters have demonstrated the changing shape of public communication in times of crisis. Mass media and face-to-face communication are now complemented by a variety of channels from SMS to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

This project combines large-scale quantitative and close qualitative analysis to investigate the public use of social media during disasters, working with key emergency management organisations to improve their communication strategies. It will highlight successful approaches as well as potential pitfalls; the strategies which the project will develop and test will help to make emergency responses in natural disasters faster and more effective.

The project builds on and substantially extends the various bits of work we’ve already been doing in this area, and which we’ve reported on in this blog and elsewhere over the last several months (and here I should especially acknowledge the contribution of Frances Shaw at UNSW). Really looking forward to getting going on this one in the new year – stay tuned for updates!

OK, it’s taken a little while, but we’ve now finally put all the presentations from our panel on social media and crisis communication at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Seattle in October online. Three of the four have audio as well – my apologies to our last presenter, Anders Larsson, but the batteries on my audio recorder ran out just as he got started!

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I was briefly in Perth on Friday, to present our research into the use of Twitter for crisis communication during recent natural disasters at the RightClick 2011 event organised by the Institute for Public Administration Australia. A stimulating day with some very interesting speakers – many thanks to the organisers for the invitation!

Below are my slides, with audio. The next stops for Jean and me will be Taipei (where we’re participating in a crisis communication workshop with our colleagues from National Cheng Chi University) and Seattle (for the 2011 Association of Internet Researchers conference). More from those events soon…

About a month ago now, more than 15 Australian and international researchers as well as industry representatives came together at QUT to participate in the interdisciplinary research workshop The World According to Twitter (#WAT11) which set out to explore innovative theoretical and methodological approaches to researching Twitter, to develop a better overview of current topics, purposes, and applications of Twitter research, identify key research questions, and share possible methodological approaches for addressing them. The workshop was held in the context of Axel and Jean’s collaboration with the University of Düsseldorf Junior Researchers Group “Science and the Internet” and saw visiting fellows Katrin Weller and Cornelius Puschmann amongst the group of presenters.

From left to right: Katrin Weller, Stephen Harrington, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess and Cornelius Puschmann at the The World According To Twitter workshop

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I’m pushing my luck by heading down to Melbourne again tomorrow – hopefully without being held up by ash clouds, pilot strikes, or any other unforeseen disruptions, this time. I’m there to speak at the Emergence Management Conference, to present (again) on our research into the use of Twitter in particular and social media more generally during the recent Queensland floods and Christchurch earthquake(s). Looking forward to it!

Regular visitors to the blog might not find all that much new information in my presentation, compared to what we’ve already published here in the past. But nonetheless, here it is (audio to come later, hopefully now online, too):

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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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As I’m sure you’re aware, last week was pretty rough for Queensland (and then New South Wales and Victoria), as devastating flash floods ripped through Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley, quickly followed by extreme river flooding in Ipswich and Brisbane that saw thousands of homes inundated. As in any emergency situation or other ‘acute event’, public communication played a vital role during all phases of the flooding – from warning, to emergency, and – eventually – to recovery, relief and rebuilding.

In this and the related Media Ecologies project in the CCI, we’re trying to understand how public communication is constituted through the operation of the broader media ecology, including social media as well as the full range of other communication technologies and practices that individual citizens have at their disposal. So we’re throwing all the research tools we have in our kit (and developing some new ones) at analysing public communication during the floods – initially through the lens of social media, and particularly, Twitter.

Axel has already posted a first look at some overall patterns of Twitter activity during the most acute period of the event, and at the end of the post asked our readers to nominate research questions and ideas for us to investigate – thanks very much to those who’ve contributed ideas so far. There is much more to do of course, and we’re on the case. In this and subsequent posts, I’m focusing on some patterns in the uses made of various media platforms and sources by Twitter users during the flood.

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Update: added another graph showing the total number of tweets from leading accounts.

Queensland has just experienced a once-in-decades flood event, with the capital Brisbane (where we’re based) hit especially hard. Social media like Twitter and Facebook played an important role in getting information out and organising rescue, relief, and recovery operations.

We’ll have a much closer look at the role of these platforms during the height of the crisis at a later stage, when we find the time – for now, I wanted to post a quick overview of the level of Twitter activity at least. This graph shows tweets using the #qldflood(s) hashtags between 11 and 14 January 2011 (retrieved via Twapperkeeper):

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