Paper presented by Jean Burgess at the Media in Transition 8 conference, Boston, 3-5 May 2013.

1. Mapping the Australian
Twittersphere
Jean Burgess & Axel Bruns
@jeanburgess @snurb_dot_info
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/
Queensland University of Technology

2. NEW MEDIA AND PUBLIC COMMUNICATION:
MAPPING AUSTRALIAN USER-CREATED CONTENT
IN ONLINE SOCIAL NETWORKS
• 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’
– Motivated by media, communication & cultural studies’ concerns; combining
quantitative analytics with qualitative analysis

3. ‘BIG DATA’ & INTERNET RESEARCH
• Big Data as currency across the sciences and social sciences
• Business intelligence & ‘data markets’ (including social media &
online behavioral data).
• ‘Computational turn’ in new humanities research: shift from
computational tools to a new computational paradigm, changing the
ontologies and epistemologies of humanities research (Berry, 2012).
• Eg shift from ‘close’ to ‘distant’ reading (Moretti); ‘software studies’
(eg Fuller, 2008) and ANT approaches to new media platforms;
• From ‘virtual’/trad social research methods to ‘natively’ digital
methods to diagnose patterns of social change (Rogers, 2009).

4. • Data Gathering
– yourTwapperkeeper + in-house crawler
– Reliant on Twitter API
• Data Processing
– Custom Gawk scripts – open source, multiplatform,
programmable command-line tool for processing CSV
documents
• Analytics & Visualisation
– Gephi – open source, multiplatform network visualisation tool
– MS Excel – comparative metrics, coding
A TWITTER RESEARCH TOOLKIT

5. #HASHTAG PUBLICS
• Publics
– Attend to matters of shared concern with some level of co-awareness
– Varied in intensity and temporality
– Emergent, constituted via discourse & affect
• #hashtags
– ‘#’ + keyword makes tweets easily discoverable and marks themes
– E.g. #ausvotes, #qldfloods, #mit8, #swag, #nofilter, …
• #hashtag publics
– Not all hashtags constitute publics; hashtags don’t represent the sum of
engagement with these topics on Twitter; Twitter doesn’t ‘contain’ publics
– What are the patterns in the dynamics of different hashtag-based publics?
– What might account for these differences?

6. #QLDFLOODS TWEETS
10 Jan 2011 11 Jan 2011 12 Jan 2011 13 Jan 2011 14 Jan 2011 15 Jan 2011

7. #AUSVOTES: LEADERS

8. #QLDFLOODS @REPLIES
mainstream
media
authorities

9. #AUSPOL (FEB.-DEC. 2011)

10. TOWARDS COMPARATIVE METRICS

11. MAPPING THE AUSTRALIAN TWITTERSPHERE
• Snowballing: what is the Australian user-base?
• Starting from selected hashtag communities in 2010
(e.g. #ausvotes, #qldfloods, #masterchef)
• Identifying participating accounts, testing for ‘Australianness’:
• Timezone setting, location information, profile information
• Retrieving follower/followee information for each account (very slow)
• Progress update (end 2012):
• ~1.06 million Australian accounts identified so far
• ~2 million Australian accounts in total?

12. DISCLAIMERS
The map is not the territory
(Korzybski)
…and certainly not the
destination

13. Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = outdegree, size = indegree

14. Perth
Marketing / PR
Design
Web
Creative
Farming
Agriculture
Hardline
Conservatives
Conservatives
Journalists
ALP
Progressives
Greens
News
Opinion
News
NGOs
Social Policy
IT
Tech
Social Media
Tech
PR
Advertising
Real Estate
Property
Jobs
HR
Business
Business
Property
Parenting
Mums Craft
Arts
Food
Wine
Beer
Adelaide
Social
ICTs
Creative
Design
Fashion
Beauty
Utilities
Services
Net Culture
Books
Literature
Publishing
Film
Theatre
Arts
Radio
TV Music
Dance
Hip Hop
Triple J
Talkback
Breakfast TV
CelebritiesCycling
Union
NRL
Football
Cricket
AFL
Swimming
V8s
Evangelicals
Teaching
e-Learning
Schools
Christians
Hillsong
Teens
Jonas Bros.
Beliebers
@KRuddMP
@JuliaGillard

15. #AUSPOL
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #auspol tweets, size = indegree

16. #AUSVOTES
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #ausvotes tweets, size = indegree

17. #QLDFLOODS
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #qldfloods tweets, size = indegree

18. #EQNZ
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #eqnz tweets, size = indegree

19. #ROYALWEDDING
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #royalwedding tweets, size = indeg.

20. #MASTERCHEF
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = #masterchef tweets, size = indeg.

21. ABC.NET.AU URLS
URLs for Feb 2013
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = tweets with URLs, size = indegree

22. NEWS.COM.AU URLS
URLs for Feb 2013
Follower/followee network:
~120,000 Australian Twitter users
(of ~950,000 known accounts by early 2012)
colour = tweets with URLs, size = indegree

23. http://mappingonlinepublics.net/