tracing publics in the australian blogosphere: new methods for international communication research

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