cci paper

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Developing methods of tracking

distributed political discourse

Barry Saunders

PhD candidate, CreativeIndustries QUT

http://investigativeblog.net

http://gatewatching.org

Research draws onOpportunities in CitizenJournalism ARC Linkageproject

Comic: http://xkcd.com/386/

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Thanks to

Axel Bruns, Terry Flew, Kay Saunders

Jason Wilson, Tim Highfield

Thomas Nicholai, Lars Kirchhoff

SBS, Online Opinion, Cisco, the Brisbane

Institute and QUT

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The problem

Visualising and tracking political

discussion on blogs and websites

Network mapping (linkfluence) is only one

aspect of the question

Google Pagerank is useful but limited

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Network mapping approaches

From http://linkfluence.net/

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Issues with this approach

Useful for identifying a static social

network

But blog conversations are often not static

Also does not look at conversations

themselves, simply linkages, privileges

bloggers over the community

Can mistake blogrolls for article links

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So then

A multilevel, iterative palimpsestic

approach

Tools: Issuecrawler

Leximancer

datascraper

Excel

Many Eyes

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approach

Choose issue and common search terms

Choose parameters

Develop seed list

Plug into Issuecrawler

Take generated URLs and add to datascraper

Take scraped data and add to Leximancer

Take Leximancer data and add to Many Eyes

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Case Study

Australian political blogosphere

Search term “Australian 2020 Summit”

Generated seeds using Blogs.com.au

Fed into Issuecrawler

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Issuecrawler map 2020

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Detail

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Detail

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Leximancer

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Leximancer

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Many eyes

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Club Troppo associated term frequency

- “Labor”

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Larvatus Prodeo associated term

frequency: “Labor”

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Ongoing research

Many-eyes can be used to track term

frequency over time

Looking to map term frequency against

linkages

Develop tools for visualising changes over

time, with discussion terms, linkages and

quantity and popularity of posts mapped

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Ongoing research

Understanding development of politicaldiscussion online

Methods for tracking political opinion aswe move to post-broadcast environmentwithout necessarily clearly defined opinionleaders

Information for understand notions of thepublic sphere in the age of the internet