Mapping Online Publics

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 →

I’m writing this from the University of Urbino, where I am spending a week as an academic visitor, leading up to a one-day mini-conference on research methods on Thursday, which I’ll blog about in a few days’ time.

Since I’m here, I thought it might be useful to do a quick comparative study of the popular uses of YouTube, looking at Italy and Australia, – Australia because obviously that’s the focus of our current project; and Italy because, well, I’m here and have access to local knowledge, and I think there could be some interesting similarities and differences. Also, Axel and I are gearing up for the ECREA pre-conference ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ in a few weeks’ time – while we’ll be discussing the blog and twitter mapping we’ve been doing, the issues of working within and across ‘national containers’ is currently at the front of my mind.

I am going to post these preliminary research notes on YouTube in Italy and Australia in two parts:

1. A look at the 20 most viewed videos of all time, comparing the Australian and Italian versions (that’s this post)
2. A look at the 20 most subscribed channels in the same locations (that’s the next post).

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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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