European Communication Conference (ECREA) 2014

Mapping a National Twittersphere: A ‘Big Data’ Analysis of Australian Twitter User Networks

Axel Bruns, Darryl Woodford, Troy Sadkowsky, and Tim Highfield

• 13 Nov. 2014 – European Communication Conference (ECREA), Lisbon

Twitter research to date has focussed mainly on the study of isolated events, as described for example by specific hashtags or keywords relating variously to elections (Larsson & Moe, 2012), natural disasters (Mendoza et al., 2010), entertainment (Highfield et al., 2013) and sporting events (Bruns et al., 2014), and other moments of heightened activity in the network. This limited focus is determined in part by the limitations placed on large-scale access to Twitter data by Twitter, Inc. itself. By contrast, only a handful of studies – usually by researchers associated with commercially funded research organisations or with Twitter, Inc. itself – have utilised the Twitter ‘firehose’ or similar more comprehensive sources of data to explore broader patterns of traffic flows or follower connections on the platform (e.g. Leetaru et al., 2013).

This project builds on a long-term, large-scale analysis of the global Twitter userbase which has managed to identify within the over 725 million global registered Twitter accounts some 2.5 million Australian accounts (by matching profile details such as location, description, and timezone against a set of relevant criteria). Further, we analysed the follower/followee connections of these 2.5 million accounts and from this developed a first comprehensive map of account relationships within the Australian Twittersphere. In-depth network analysis of this map reveals the existence of a range of clusters of especially tightly interconnected users, linked to each other by other accounts acting as bridges between the clusters. In turn, qualitative exploration of the leading account’s profiles in each cluster provides an indication of the various areas of thematic focus which have determined the formation of these clusters, and their association with other clusters in the same network vicinity. Further correlation with other relevant profile data (including the creation date for each account, its level of tweeting activity, and the date of the account’s last tweet) offers additional opportunities to trace the emergence and growing complexity of the Australian Twittersphere over time, from the earliest adopters of the platform to its most recent users, and to filter the overall network for the most active and most persistent users.

This study represents the first ever comprehensive investigation of the development of a national Twittersphere as an entity in its own right. While the global nature of Twitter as a social media platform means that Australian accounts will also be connected with their counterparts in other countries, it is still to be expected that shared interests and identity lead to the majority of connections between accounts to occur within the same national user population, and our analysis of these connection patterns provides an important indicator of the themes around which these connections crystallise, as well as of the longitudinal development of these clusters of interests.

Bruns, A., Weller, K., & Harrington, S. (2014). Twitter and Sports: Football Fandom in Emerging and Established Markets. In K. Weller, A. Bruns, J. Burgess, M. Mahrt, & C. Puschmann (Eds.), Twitter and Society (pp. 263–280). New York: Peter Lang.

Highfield, T., Harrington, S., & Bruns, A. (2013). Twitter as a Technology for Audiencing and Fandom: The #Eurovision Phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society, 16(3), 315–39. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2012.756053

Larsson, A.O., & Moe, H. (2011). Studying Political Microblogging: Twitter Users in the 2010 Swedish Election Campaign. New Media & Society, 14(5). doi:10.1177/1461444811422894

Leetaru, K., Wang, S., Cao, G., Padmanabhan, A., & Shook, E. (2013). Mapping the Global Twitter Heartbeat: The Geography of Twitter. First Monday, 18(5). doi:10.5210/fm.v18i5.4366

Mendoza, M., Poblete, B., & Castillo, C. (2010) Twitter under Crisis: Can We Trust What We RT? Paper presented at Social Media Analytics, KDD '10 Workshops, Washington, DC, 25 July 2010. Available from: http://research.yahoo.com/files/mendoza_poblete_castillo_2010_twitter_terremoto.pdf

Twitter Analytics Workshop 2014

Mapping Online Publics: New Methods for Twitter Research

Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, and Darryl Woodford

• 12 June 2014 – Twitter Workshop: Analysing Network Data, Göttingen

The study of Twitter at large scale and in close to real time requires the development of new methodological approaches which are able to process, analyse, and visualise the ‘big social data’ which can be accessed through the Twitter API. The Mapping Online Publics project in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) at Queensland University of Technology has developed a number of approaches to the study of short- and long-term Twitter publics, from analyses of the dynamics of ad hoc issue publics around natural disasters and political crises through the tracking of information flows and audience interests across mainstream and social media to the comprehensive mapping of the Australian Twittersphere. This presentation will outline the methodological approaches developed for this work, and reflect on the opportunities and challenges facing social media researchers.

Axel Bruns is an Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He leads the QUT Social Media Research Group and is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008) and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and a co-editor of Twitter and Society (2014), A Companion to New Media Dynamics (2012) and Uses of Blogs (2006). His current work focusses on the study of user participation in social media spaces such as Twitter, especially in the context of acute events. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he tweets at @snurb_dot_info. See http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ for more details on his research into social media.

Jean Burgess is Deputy Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation (CCI) and Associate Professor, Digital Media in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology. She is involved in several research projects that apply computer-assisted methods to the analysis of large-scale social media data. Her books include YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture (Polity Press, 2009), Studying Mobile Media: Cultural Technologies, Mobile Communication, and the iPhone (Routledge, 2012) and A Companion to New Media Dynamics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). Over the past decade she has worked with a large number of government, industry and community-based organisations, focusing on the uses of social and co-creative media to increase participation, advocacy and engagement.

Darryl Woodford is a Research Fellow in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation (CCI) at Queensland University of Technology. He has a background in Engineering and Game Studies, including research on the agency of avatars in virtual environments. His current research includes work on social norms and regulation in the video game and gambling industries, and he is leading the development of new digital methods for measuring and evaluating television audience engagement using social media analytics.

Media Talk Symposium 2014

Layers of Communication: Forms of Talk on Twitter

Axel Bruns

• 24 Apr. 2014 – Media Talk Symposium, Brisbane

With some 2.5 million accounts, especially representing the influential 25-55 age range, Twitter has become an important social media platform in Australia. It has found key applications in areas ranging from politics and crisis communication to entertainment and sports, but also facilitates everyday communication between like-minded individuals and communities. In spite of the increased scholarly attention on the uses of Twitter across these practices, however, the question of what kind(s) of communication Twitter represents remains largely underexplored, and the forms of interaction that the platform enables have yet to be fully theorised.

Building on prior work by Bruns & Moe (2014), this paper explores the various layers of communication which exist on Twitter, from direct, dyadic @reply exchanges between clearly identified communication partners at the micro level through narrowcast message dissemination to the followers of an account at the meso level to many-to-many exchanges in ad hoc publics created by hashtags at the macro level. It outlines the different types and formats of talk which are able to occur at each of these levels, and shows the interweaving of the information and communication flows which take place on each of them. In doing so, it outlines the complexities of communication on Twitter, and points to new challenges in Twitter research.

References:

Axel Bruns and Hallvard Moe. (2014). “Structural Layers of Communication on Twitter.” In Twitter and Society, eds. Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 15-28.