Download - Tracing Publics in the Australian Blogosphere: New Methods for International Communication Research
Tracing publics in the Australian blogosphere
New methods for international
communication research
Axel Bruns Jean Burgess
Queensland University of Technology
Lars KirchhoffThomas Nicolai
Sociomantic Labs
http://mappingonlinepublics.net
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’
•Builds on previous work of the research team (UCC, YouTube, blogosphere mapping)
•Advances beyond established approaches - beyond political blogospheres, beyond snapshots
•Addressing the problem of scale (‘Big Data’) and disciplinary change in media, cultural and communication studies.
New Media and Public Communication: Mapping Australian User-Created Content in Online Social Networks
http://mappingonlinepublics.net
theoretical framework •changing media ecology (UCC and ‘mainstream’ media)•dynamics of public communication (emergent, event-based, affective)
baseline empirical questions •levels of activity? •topics of interest? •clusters and communities?•changes over time?
advanced questions: cultural implications•Do matters of shared concern activate new connections among different communities/networks?
•How do acute media ‘events’ transform the media ecology?
methods•large-scale data gathering•development of computer-assisted techniques for both broad and recursively focused analysis
•identification of key events, clusters and communities•close qualitative analysis
Data Gathering
Blogs: In-house crawler & database + export tools
Twitter: Twapperkeeper - in-house crawler in development
Data Processing
Gawk – open source, multiplatform, programmable command-line tool for processing CSV documents
Textual Analysis
Leximancer – commercial (University of Queensland), multiplatform: extracts key concepts from large corpora of text, examines and visualises concept co-occurrence
WordStat – commercial, PC-only text analysis tool; generates concept co-occurrence data that can be exported for visualisation
Visualisation
Gephi – open source, multiplatform network visualisation tool
Tools
Analysis – Blogs
BushfiresBudget
Qld Election
New Sites Added
Overall Patterns of Activity (Jan.-Aug. 2009)From previous work by Bruns et al
Blog Network (between known blogs only)(17 July to 27 August 2010 | 3.4 million links | Node size: Indegree | See: http://mappingonlinepublics.net/2010/09/22/mapping-the-australian-blogosphere-some-more/)
politicsfood
parenting
arts & crafts
design and style
Analysis – Twitter (Twapperkeeper #hashtag archives)
9
#masterchef @reply network
size: indegree
colour: outdegree
10
most-tweeted election videos
11
#ausvotes election themes
12
• re-emergence of ‘national’ frames (reterritorialisation; region-specific platform dominance; uptake beyond early adopters)
• both culturally-bound and transcultural ‘issue publics’ (within and beyond the nation-state)
• shared methodologies: possibilities for international comparative and/or collaborative work
• eg hashtags that are of interest across national boundaries
towards international and transcultural research