Mapping Online Publics: Understanding the Role of Twitter in Public Communication

Mapping Online Publics:
Understanding the Role of Twitter
in Public Communication
Assoc. Prof. Axel Bruns
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia

a.bruns@qut.edu.au – http://snurb.info/ – @snurb_dot_info
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/


Why Twitter?
o Researching Twitter:
o Significant world-wide social network
o ~200 million users (but how many active?)
o Varied range of uses: from phatic communication to emergency
coordination
o Healthy third-party ecosystem (for now)
o Strong history of user innovation:
@replies, #hashtags
o Flat and open network structure:
non-reciprocal following, public profiles by default
o Good API for gathering data for research


New Media and Public Communication:
Mapping Australian User-Created Content
in Online Social Networks
o Australian Research Council (ARC) Discovery Project (2010-13) – $410,000
o QUT (Brisbane), Sociomantic Labs (Berlin)
o First comprehensive study of Australian social media use
o Computer-assisted cultural analysis: tracking, mapping, analysing
blogs, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube as ‘networked publics’
o Addressing the problem of scale (‘Big Data’) and disciplinary change in media, cultural and
communication studies – natively digital methods
o Studying society with the Internet (Richard Rogers)

 http://mappingonlinepublics.net/


#hashtag Publics
o #hashtags
o ‘#’ + keyword makes tweets easily discoverable and marks themes
o E.g. #ausvotes, #qldfloods, #londonriots, #royalwedding, #euro2012, …

o Publics
o Attend to matters of shared concern with some level of co-awareness
o Varied in intensity and temporality
o Emergent, constituted via discourse & affect

o #hashtag publics
o Not all hashtags constitute publics; Twitter doesn’t ‘contain’ publics
o What are the patterns in the dynamics of different hashtag-based publics?
o What might account for these differences?


Tools
o Data Gathering
o yourTwapperkeeper + in-house crawler

o Data Processing
o Gawk – open source, multiplatform, programmable command-line tool
for processing CSV documents

o Textual Analysis
o Leximancer – commercial, multiplatform: extracts key concepts from
large corpora of text, examines and visualises concept co-occurrence
o WordStat – commercial, PC-only text analysis tool; generates concept
co-occurrence data that can be exported for visualisation

o Visualisation
o Gephi – open source, multiplatform network visualisation tool


But Why?
o Possible research questions:
o Ad hoc events and publics:
o How do online publics form and dissolve? How do they
interact, what structures do they form?
o Where do they draw information from? What do they share?
o Do they simply consist of the usual suspects? How insular
and disconnected are online publics?
o Hashtags in context:
o How do different hashtag events compare? Are there
common types of hashtags/publics?
o How ‘big’ are they? What topics attract attention on
Twitter?
o What community (?) structures emerge?


#qldfloods @replies
authorities

mainstream
media

#ausvotes: Leaders


Hashtag Publics, Hashtag Metrics
o How big is the central core of users?
o Long tail distribution: most active users responsible for
the majority of content
o 90/9/1 rule: how much does the top 1% of users
contribute?
o #royalwedding: ~10% of all tweets
o #qldfloods: ~17% of all tweets
o #auspol: ~65% of all tweets
o What do they do: inform, share, chat?
o How many links do they share?
o How much retweeting do they do (edited/unedited)?
o How many @replies do they send / receive?
o … etc.


Towards Comparative Metrics


Towards a Typology of Twitter Uses
o How are hashtags used (during acute events)?
o Gatewatching:
o Finding and sharing information about breaking news (before
the mainstream media do?)
o Ad hoc publics: many URLs, many retweets (even unedited)
o Audiencing:
o Shared experience of major (foreseen) events
o Imagined community of fellow participants: few URLs, limited
retweeting
o What other uses are there?
o Continuing discussions (#auspol, #bundesliga, …)
o Memes (#ghettohurricanenames, …)
o Emotive hashtags (#fail, #win, #headdesk, …)
o What about keywords?


Beyond Hashtags
o Publics on Twitter:
o Micro: @reply and retweet conversations
o Meso: hashtag ‘communities’
o Macro: follower/followee networks

 Multiple overlapping publics / networks

o What drives their formation and dissipation?
o How do they interact and interweave?
o How are they interleaved with the wider
media ecology?
o Twitter doesn’t contain publics: publics transcend Twitter


Twitter and/in the Media Ecology

Understanding Australian Twitter Use

o What is the Australian Twitter userbase?
o Large-scale snowballing project
o Starting from selected hashtag communities
(e.g. #ausvotes, #qldfloods, #masterchef)
o Identifying participating users, testing for ‘Australianness’:
o Timezone setting, location information, profile information
o Retrieving follower/followee information for each account
(very slow)

o Progress update:
o ~950,000 Australian users identified so far, ~21m connections
 ~2 million Australian users in total?


The Australian Twittersphere?

Follower/followee network:
~150,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~550,000 known accounts by mid-2011)
colour = outdegree, size = indegree

The Australian Twittersphere?

(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = outdegree, size = indegree

Real Estate
Jobs
Property
HR
Business
Parenting

Thematic Clusters
Design
Business
Property
Mums Craft
Arts
Web Social Media
Creative Tech Food
Perth PR Wine
Marketing / PR Advertising
IT
Beer
Tech
Creative
Social
Design
ICTs
NGOs Fashion
Utilities
Farming Social Policy Beauty
Services
Agriculture Net Culture
Adelaide
Opinion Books Theatre
Greens News Literature Film Arts
Publishing
ALP
Hardline Progressives
News @KRuddMP
Conservatives
@JuliaGillard Radio
Conservatives TV Music
Journalists Triple J
Talkback
Dance
Breakfast TV
Hip Hop
Cycling Celebrities
Union
Evangelicals Swimming
NRL V8s

Football Teens
Christians
Cricket Teaching Hillsong
AFL e-Learning
Schools Jonas Bros.
Beliebers

#auspol

colour = #auspol tweets, size = indegree

#ausvotes

colour = #ausvotes tweets, size = indegree

#royalwedding

colour = #royalwedding tweets, size = indeg.

abc.net.au URLs

colour = tweets with URLs, size = indegree

Understanding Twitter Publics
o #hashtags:
o Useful coordinating mechanism for core discussion
o Relatively easy to capture and analyse
o Fails to capture non-hashtagged tweets about the topic
o Good case studies, but very little comparative work to date

o National / global Twittersphere maps
o Crucial contextual baseline for #hashtag case studies
o Slow and laborious data gathering process, never complete
o Very long-term perspective, beyond most funded projects
o Indispensable for study of Twitter as a public space


‘Big Data’ and the Digital Humanities
o Emerging needs in Twitter research:
o Unified, compatible methods and metrics for Twitter analysis
 Tools and approaches shared at http://mappingonlinepublics.net/
o Powerful infrastructure for long-term, high-volume tracking of
Australian public communication on Twitter
 Data access requires substantial funding stream
o Facilities for long-term data storage and preservation
 Key roles for National Library, National Archives
o Integration with related datasets (e.g. MSM content)
 Need to address data interoperability questions

o Twitter as a test case for digital humanities research
o Widespread, open, public platform for everyday communication
o Tool for observing society at scale through Internet research



@snurb_dot_info
@jeanburgess
@_StephenH
@DrTNitins
@timhighfield
@cdtavijit


Mapping Online Publics: Understanding the Role of Twitter in Public Communication

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Mapping Online Publics: Understanding the Role of Twitter in Public Communication