Mapping Online Publics

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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As we head into the last week before the Australian federal election, here’s a quick update to my last post where I collected together the most-tweeted YouTube videos out of the #ausvotes Twapperkeeper archive so far. That post only took us up to Friday 6 August – which is centuries ago in election time.

Last week (Sunday 8 Aug to Saturday 15 Aug) saw a few breakthrough hits, especially the ABC’s Gruen Nation fake pro-Greens ad produced by Republic of Everything; some snippets of Sky news coverage; and the usual retweets of official campaign ads. Note that the reasonably popular Time Warp spoof (the ALP’s attempt at a ‘viral’ video) seems to have been pulled by YouTube due to alleged copyright infringement, but as of now it’s still up on Vimeo. Results follow below.

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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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