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.
   

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.

So, we had ourselves a fine little panel on tracking and mapping social media at the AoIR 2010 conference in Gothenburg today. Below is the presentation from our Mapping Online Publics project (with audio) – and over at snurb.info you can also find my blog posts from the presentations by Hallvard Moe, Christian Nuernbergk, and Tim Highfield. My overall coverage of AoIR 2010 is also online there.

(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 is a quick demo of how the new timeline feature works in Gephi 0.7 beta. We’ve used 5 hours worth of @reply data from the Twapperkeeper archives for the #spill hashtag. This period corresponds to the ‘acute event’ in Australian politics that kicked off the election that sidetracked our research (in all kinds of productive ways, of course) – the day (the evening, and then the next morning) when now-PM Julia Gillard overthrew then-PM Kevin Rudd. Please don’t read too much (or indeed anything) into the actual analysis here, but for the sake of completeness: I’ve indicated betweenness centrality with both colour (red at the high end, yellow at the low end) and size.

The possibilities here are very interesting, particularly if we use better quality data that is properly set up for longitudinal analysis – e.g. so the nodes scale up and down properly through time. I’m pretty sure Axel has one of his epic and highly detailed methods posts up his sleeve in relation to all this, but for now, enjoy the pretty moving pictures – and apologies for the jerky cursor movements – I’m on the road and so without a mouse.

If you’re interested in any of the detail it is probably best viewed at the YouTube website in HD and fullscreen:

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 →

Update: this analysis covers a few less days than I originally stated – the results should look quite different once we add in this week’s links (and next week’s!).

Here are the top 20 Australian election-related YouTube videos so far up to last Friday morning, according to the Twitterati. Or to be more precise, here are the 20 videos which have been linked to the most in tweets containing the #ausvotes hashtag posted between 17 July and 6 August, according to the Twapperkeeper archive.

Couple of interesting things to note:

• the mismatches between the Twitter link rankings of some of these videos with the number of views they have received on YouTube;
• the low numbers of links generally (could be a glitch with the scripts, but I’m reasonably confident it isn’t)
• the reasonably solid performance of ‘made-for-web’ comedy videos performed and/or produced by professionals
• the high retweet value of ‘official’ campaign videos (in which I’d probably count GetUp!) – although it’s important to note that the tweets that go alongside the videos are frequently less-than flattering…
• and if I may add a personal note, the only mild sharpness or funniness of even the sharpest and funniest of these videos…

Read the rest of this entry →