cci paper
TRANSCRIPT
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
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/
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
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
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
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
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
Network mapping approaches
From http://linkfluence.net/
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
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
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
So then
A multilevel, iterative palimpsestic
approach
Tools: Issuecrawler
Leximancer
datascraper
Excel
Many Eyes
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
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
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
Case Study
Australian political blogosphere
Search term “Australian 2020 Summit”
Generated seeds using Blogs.com.au
Fed into Issuecrawler
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
Issuecrawler map 2020
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
Detail
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
Detail
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
Leximancer
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
Leximancer
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
Many eyes
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
Club Troppo associated term frequency
- “Labor”
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
Larvatus Prodeo associated term
frequency: “Labor”
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
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
c r e a t i v e nd u s t r i e si
creativeindustries.qut.comCRICOS No. 00213J
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