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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Update: I’ve clarified/corrected some of the details relating to the percentile metrics contained in the first table which metrify.awk generates.

Update 2: revision 1.2 of metrify.awk adds further functionality in addition to what is described below. These changes are detailed here.

In the previous post, I’ve introduced metrify.awk, our new multi-purpose tool for generating Twitter metrics. Over the next instalments in this series of posts, I’ll take you through the results it produces. And seeing as we’re coming up to the anniversary of the January 2011 south-east Queensland floods, and as I needed to generate those metrics anyway, for a report on social media in the floods which we’re publishing soon, I’ll be using an archive of #qldfloods tweets between 10 and 17 January 2011 as an example here.

I’m running metrify.awk as follows for this:

gawk -F , -f metrify.awk divisions=90,99 time=day qldfloods.csv >qldfloods-metrics.csv

In other words, we’re using a 1/9/90 division of users, and we’re tracking activities per day; the skipusers switch is not set, so full stats for all users will be generated.

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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…

Amsterdam.
After the ECPR conference in Reykjavík, I’ve been lucky enough to spend a week in Amsterdam, where I was invited to present a guest lecture as part of the festive opening of the University of Amsterdam’s ‘new media season’: the official welcoming of the 2011/12 cohort of students in the MA in New Media. My talk presented an overview of our work in Mapping Online Publics so far, with special attention to our work on Twitter. In particular, I spoke about the role of Twitter during the Queensland floods and other crises, as well as our recent breakthroughs in identifying different tweeting activities taking place in the context of different hashtags.

Below are my slides for the talk, with audio (unfortunately I placed my voice recorder in front of the laptop exhaust fan, resulting in a very noisy recording that needed substantial noise reduction, so the audio quality is somewhat below par…). My sincere thanks to Richard Rogers for the invitation to speak to the MA students – looks like a very exciting course.

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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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Tomorrow, our Mapping Online Publics project team is hosting the public research workshop The World According to Twitter at QUT, in collaboration with our visiting researchers Katrin Weller and Cornelius Puschmann from the Junior Researchers Group "Science and the Internet" at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany. The workshop is the first major event in our two ATN-DAAD research projects with colleagues in Düsseldorf and Münster, and should provide a great starting point for a very exciting research programme. We’ve already spent most of the past week in intensive research sharing mode with Katrin and Cornelius, and you’ll see some of the first outcomes of our brainstorming activities appear on this blog soon.

Tomorrow, though, is all about taking stock of where the still very nascent area of Twitter research is at. We’ll be making our contribution to the programme by looking at some of our key outcomes from the past year or so – especially, of course, our work on the use of Twitter in crises like the Queensland floods – as well as giving a first preview of what’s coming up later this year. And the day after tomorrow, we’re presenting a Twitter methods workshop at the Communities & Technologies conference here in Brisbane – more on that soon.

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Melbourne.
I spoke today at the National Public Service Digital Media Officers’ Forum (now that’s a mouthful…) here in Melbourne, where I had been invited to present our Mapping Online Publics project – to a group of state- and federal-level public servants who are charged, in their various roles, with driving their diverse departments’ and organisations’ social media and Government 2.0 strategies.

A good opportunity to have some very interesting discussions and make some great new connections (as well as renew a few old ones) – and my talk ended up being something of a progress update on our work in the project to date, with a particular focus, of course, on the Twitter research we’ve been doing, and using the Queensland floods experience as a concrete example (since @QPSMedia’s performance during the floods is also a major success story for the Queensland Police Service as a public service). Not so good: the fact that I ended up having to stay on in Melbourne overnight, due to the ash cloud crisis – hope I can get back to Brisbane soon…

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Part of our job in the Mapping Online Publics project is also to raise the public profile for what scholarly research into the uses of Twitter and other social media can achieve, of course – so here are a few more pointers to recent coverage of our work.

First, after my keynote at the CeDEM conference in Austria, I was also interviewed (in German) by Ulla Ebner the Austrian radio channel Ö1, to discuss the role of Twitter during the Queensland floods and the impact of WikiLeaks on government and politics. The interview is now online (as audio and transcript) here.

The other big Twitter-related story in recent weeks was the killing of Osama bin Laden, of course – and I had a piece in The Conversation about the role of Twitter in spreading the news (as well as, unwittingly, live-tweeting the raid on bin Laden’s compound as it happened), which was also republished in Technology Spectator. It’s in the nature of these brief opinion pieces that they end up getting edited down further than you’d like, so here’s the full article as I originally wrote it:

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