RightClick 2011

Social Media Use in the Queensland Floods and Christchurch Earthquake

Axel Bruns

• 30 September 2011 – RightClick, Institute of Public Administration Australia (WA), Perth

Challenge Social Innovation 2011 conference (CSI 2011)

Ad Hoc Innovation by Users of Social Networks: The Case of Twitter

Axel Bruns

• 19 September 2011 – Challenge Social Innovation 2011 conference, Vienna

Düsseldorf Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Twitter Analysis (DIATA2011)

Mapping Online Publics on Twitter

Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, and Stephen Harrington

• 14 September 2011 – DIATA11 workshop, Düsseldorf

Future of Journalism conference (FoJ 2011)

New Methodologies for Researching News Discussion on Twitter

Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess

• 8 September 2011 – Future of Journalism conference, Cardiff

Mapping Online Publics: Researching the Uses of Twitter

Axel Bruns

• 1 September 2011 – Festive Opening of the New Media Season, University of Amsterdam

European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR 2011)

The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics

Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess

• 26 August 2011 – European Consortium for Political Research conference, Reykjavík

As the use of Twitter has become more commonplace throughout many nations, its role in political discussion has also increased. This has been evident in contexts ranging from general political discussion through local, state, and national elections (such as in the 2010 Australian elections) to protests and other activist mobilisation (for example in the current uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen, as well as in the controversy around WikiLeaks).

Research into the use of Twitter in such political contexts has also developed rapidly, aided by substantial advancements in quantitative and qualitative methodologies for capturing, processing, analysing, and visualising Twitter updates by large groups of users. Recent work has especially highlighted the role of the Twitter hashtag – a short keyword, prefixed with the hash symbol ‘#’ – as a means of coordinating a distributed discussion between more or less large groups of users, who do not need to be connected through existing ‘follower’ networks.

Twitter hashtags – such as ‘#ausvotes’ for the 2010 Australian elections, ‘#londonriots’ for the coordination of information and political debates around the recent unrest in London, or ‘#wikileaks’ for the controversy around WikiLeaks thus aid the formation of ad hoc publics around specific themes and topics. They emerge from within the Twitter community – sometimes as a result of pre-planning or quickly reached consensus, sometimes through protracted debate about what the appropriate hashtag for an event or topic should be (which may also lead to the formation of competing publics using different hashtags).

Drawing on innovative methodologies for the study of Twitter content, this paper examines the use of hashtags in political debate in the context of a number of major case studies.