Tracing publics in the Australian blogosphere

New methods for international

communication research

Axel Bruns Jean Burgess

Queensland University of Technology

Lars KirchhoffThomas Nicolai

Sociomantic Labs

http://mappingonlinepublics.net

Australian Research Council (ARC): Discovery Project (2010-13) – $410,000

QUT (Brisbane), Sociomantic Labs (Berlin)

•First comprehensive study of Australian social media use.

•Computer-assisted cultural analysis: tracking, mapping, analysing blogs, twitter, flickr, youtube as ‘networked publics’

•Builds on previous work of the research team (UCC, YouTube, blogosphere mapping)

•Advances beyond established approaches - beyond political blogospheres, beyond snapshots

•Addressing the problem of scale (‘Big Data’) and disciplinary change in media, cultural and communication studies.

New Media and Public Communication: Mapping Australian User-Created Content in Online Social Networks

http://mappingonlinepublics.net

theoretical framework •changing media ecology (UCC and ‘mainstream’ media)•dynamics of public communication (emergent, event-based, affective)

baseline empirical questions •levels of activity? •topics of interest? •clusters and communities?•changes over time?

advanced questions: cultural implications•Do matters of shared concern activate new connections among different communities/networks?

•How do acute media ‘events’ transform the media ecology?

methods•large-scale data gathering•development of computer-assisted techniques for both broad and recursively focused analysis

•identification of key events, clusters and communities•close qualitative analysis

Data Gathering

Blogs: In-house crawler & database + export tools

Twitter: Twapperkeeper - in-house crawler in development

Data Processing

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

Textual Analysis

Leximancer – commercial (University of Queensland), multiplatform: extracts key concepts from large corpora of text, examines and visualises concept co-occurrence

WordStat – commercial, PC-only text analysis tool; generates concept co-occurrence data that can be exported for visualisation

Visualisation

Gephi – open source, multiplatform network visualisation tool

Tools

Analysis – Blogs

BushfiresBudget

Qld Election

New Sites Added

Overall Patterns of Activity (Jan.-Aug. 2009)From previous work by Bruns et al

Blog Network (between known blogs only)(17 July to 27 August 2010 | 3.4 million links | Node size: Indegree | See: http://mappingonlinepublics.net/2010/09/22/mapping-the-australian-blogosphere-some-more/)

politicsfood

parenting

arts & crafts

design and style

Analysis – Twitter (Twapperkeeper #hashtag archives)

9

#masterchef @reply network

size: indegree

colour: outdegree

10

most-tweeted election videos

11

#ausvotes election themes

12

• re-emergence of ‘national’ frames (reterritorialisation; region-specific platform dominance; uptake beyond early adopters)

• both culturally-bound and transcultural ‘issue publics’ (within and beyond the nation-state)

• shared methodologies: possibilities for international comparative and/or collaborative work

• eg hashtags that are of interest across national boundaries

towards international and transcultural research