Paper by Jean Burgess & Ariadna Matamoros presented at Theorising Digital Society, University of Canberra, September 2015.

1. Jean Burgess & Ariadna Matamoros
Digital Media Research Centre
@qutdmrc
‘Who is this redchanit?’
Applying digital methods for
issue mapping to one week of
#gamergate

2. Digital Media Research Centre
Approach
Understand the dynamics of public
communication in the digital media
environment

Focus on social media -- supportive of ‘hybrid
forums’ (Burgess, Galloway & Sauter, 2015)

Map issues and their publics across digital
platforms

3. Digital Media Research Centre
Social
media
Theories of
publics
Participation/engage
ment in mediated
issues
Platform politics
(Gillespie, 2014)
New methods
Issue mapping
Controversy analysis
Digital methods

4. Digital Media Research Centre
Publics
“Socio-political assemblages with
shared or interlocking concerns who
know themselves and act as publics
through media and communication”

5. Digital Media Research Centre
Publics & Digital Media
‘Issue-ified publics’ (Marres, 2015) – It is a constitutive feature of
digital media that publics are increasingly ‘issue-ified’
‘Ad hoc publics’ (Bruns & Burgess, 2015) – Digital media platforms
and practices influence both the nature of publics and the means
through which they engage in issues
‘Affective publics’ (Papacharissi, 2015) – role of emotion in
mobilizing issue publics
‘Calculated publics’ (Gillespie, 2014) – algorithmic curation of
content

6. Digital Media Research Centre
How can we study how both publics
and issues emerge, engage and
overlap on different digital media
platforms?

7. Digital Media Research Centre
Issue mapping
Issue mapping
Controversy
analysis
Actor Network
Theory (Latour,
1987)
Generative (Callon,
Lascoumes, &
Barth, 2001)
Digital methods
Use the internet to
study society
‘natively digital’
objects
(Rogers, 2013)

8. Digital Media Research Centre
Existing approaches to Issue mapping
Since the early 2000- web-centered digital methods for
issue mapping / hyperlink networks (Rogers & Marres,
2000; Venturini, 2012)
Challenge? Issue mapping to social media analysis
1. Role of different platforms / ‘compromised data’ (Elmer,
Langlois & Redden, 2015
2. Role of popular culture ( i.e. Visual culture --images,
memes, gifts, videos)

9. Twitter data
collection
Issue
inventory
Other
platforms
Digital
methods tools
New discussions
about the
controversy
Digital Media Research Centre
Our approach to issue mapping
Activity over time
Most active users / @mentions
Platform bias
Other hashtags
Key media objects (URLs) ….
Scrape Public Facebook Pages
Youtube videos / Tumblr networks
….

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Case study
#Gamergate

11. Digital Media Research Centre

12. Digital Media Research Centre
(Source: Lada Adamic; Coursera course: “Social Network Analysis”)

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Acute, temporally
bounded sites of
uncertainty and
disagreement
Tumblr tag
network (tool:
Rieder, 2015;
Gephi
visualisation)

14. Digital Media Research Centre
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/02/law-order-svu-takes-
on-gamergate-everyone-loses/
Ripped from the headlines

15. Digital Media Research Centre
Starting point: Twitter
Tracking the #gamergate since 2014
DMI-TCAT (Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset)
Temporally bounded Twitter Data: 10-16 Feb. 2015
238.967 Tweets
29.278 distinct users
DATA

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Activity over time

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Other hashtags

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Top domains

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YouTube

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YouTube
Rieder, B. (2015). YouTube Data Tools

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YouTube video network
(Rieder, 2015; Gephi)

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YouTube video
network -
#gamergate
controversy
cluster

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Conclusion
• Issue mapping helps to identify important media objects in a
controversy. By combining network analysis and content analysis it
is possible to get beyond the loudest voices
• Acute controversies help to understand the dynamics of public
communication around an ongoing discussion: they reanimate
issue publics and open the debate to new publics
• The Law & Order SVU episode links the gamergate controversy
beyond itself to other debates about media, culture and
society

24. Digital Media Research Centre
References
Bruns, A., & Burgess, J. (2015). Twitter hashtags from ad hoc to calculated publics. In Rambukkana, N. (Ed.) Hashtag Publics. New York: Peter Lang. (in
press)
Bruns, A., Burgess, J., & Highfield, T. (2014). A 'Big Data' Approach to Mapping the Australian Twittersphere. In K. Bode & P. Arthur (Eds.), (Re)purposing
the (Digital) Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories (pp. 113-29). London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Burgess, J. (2014). From ‘Broadcast yourself’ to ‘Follow your interests’: Making over social media. International Journal of Cultural Studies, XX
Burgess, J. (2008). All your chocolate rain are belong to us: viral video, YouTube and the dynamics of participatory culture. In G. Lovink & S. Niederer
(Eds.), Video Vortex Reader: Responses to YouTube (pp. 101–109). Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures.
Burgess, J., & Bruns, A. (2015). Easy data, hard data: The politics and pragmatics of Twitter research after the computational turn. In G. Langlois, J.
Redden, & G. Elmer Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data (pp. XX-XX). London: Bloomsbury Press.
Burgess, J., Galloway, A. & Sauter, T. (2015). Hashtag as hybrid forum: the case of #agchatoz. In N. Rambukkana (Eds.) Hashtag Publics. New York: Peter
Lang (in press, available at http://mappingonlinepublics.net).
Callon, M., Lascoumes, P., Barth, Y. (2001). Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Driscoll, K., & Thorson, K. (2015). Searching and clustering methodologies connecting political communication content across platforms. The ANNALS of
the American Academy of Political and Social Science 659(1): 134-48.
Farrell, H. (2014) New problems, new publics? Dewey and new media. Policy & Internet 6(2): 176-191.
Gillespie, T. (2014). The relevance of algorithms. In T. Gillespie, P. Boczkowski, & K. Foot (Eds.), Media Technologies: Essays on Communication,
Materiality, and Society (pp. 167-194). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action: How to Follow Scientists and Engineers Through Society. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Livingstone, S. (2005). On the relation between audiences and publics. In: S. Livingstone (Ed.) Audiences and Publics: When Cultural Engagement Matters
for the Public Sphere (pp. 17- 41). Bristol: Intellect Books.
Marres, N. (2015) Why map issues? On controversy analysis as a digital method. Science, Technology and Human Values. [online before print doi:
10.1177/0162243915574602]
Marres, N. (2012). Material Participation: Technology, the Environment and Everyday Publics. London: Palgrave.
Papacharissi, Z. (2010). A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Rogers, R. (2013). Digital methods. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Rogers, R., & Marres, N. (2000). Landscaping climate change: A mapping technique for understanding science and technology debates on the World
Wide Web. Public Understanding of Science 9(2), 141–163.
Venturini, T. (2010). Diving in magma: How to explore controversies with actor-network theory. Public Understanding of Science 19(3): 258–273.
Venturini, T. (2012) Building on faults: How to represent controversies with digital methods. Public Understanding of Science 21(7): 796-812.
Warner, M. (2005). Publics and Counterpublics. Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press.

25. Digital Media Research Centre
Tools
YouTube video network analysis: Rieder, B. (2015). YouTube Data Tools. Computer software. Vers. 1.0.
N.p., 5 May 2015 <https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/youtube/>
Tumblr tag network analysis: Rieder, B. (2015). TumblrTool. Computer software. Updated 3 July 2015
<https://tools.digitalmethods.net/netvizz/tumblr>QUT installation of Twitter Capture and Analysis
Toolkit (DMI-TCAT) - https://wiki.digitalmethods.net/Dmi/ToolDmiTcat
Charts and basic analytics: Tableau
Network visualisations: Gephi
Slide 11
http://www.dailydot.com/geek/zoe-quinn-depression-quest-gaming-sex-scandal/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1erBDceTxI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAyncf3DBUQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p38gwKVpLAA
Image credits

26. Digital Media Research Centre
Thanks!
Jean Burgess
@jeanburgess
Ariadna Matamoros
@andairamf
@qutdmrc
http://qut.edu.au/research/dmrc