twitter, public communication and the media ecology: the case of the queensland floods
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Presented by Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess at the ATN-DAAD workshop The World According to Twitter, Brisbane, 27 June 2011. Part of an ongoing collaboration between the Mapping Online Publics project (http://mappingonlinepublics.net/) at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, QUT, Australia (http://cci.edu.au/), and the Nachwuchsforschergruppe Wissenschaft und Internet, Universität Düsseldorf, Germany (http://nfgwin.uni-duesseldorf.de/).TRANSCRIPT
Twitter, Public Communication and the Media Ecology:The Case of the Queensland Floods
Assoc. Prof. Axel Bruns / Dr. Jean BurgessARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & InnovationQueensland University of Technology
Social Media Research in the CCI
• ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries & Innovation (national, based at QUT)– Project: Media Ecologies & Methodological Innovation
• With Journalism & Media Research Centre (JMRC) @ UNSW
• Aims to implement new methods to understand the changing media environment;
• Focusing on the relationship between social media and traditional media and communication platforms;
• Combining large-scale computer-assisted techniques with qualitative social research and close textual analysis
• Focus on Crisis Communication
– Natural disasters
– Other ‘acute events’
New Media and Public Communication: Mapping Australian User-Created Content in Online Social Networks
• Bruns, Burgess, Kirchhoff & Nicolai• 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.
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: YourTwapperkeeper + in-house crawler
• 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 – Twapperkeeper (#hashtags)
•Volume over time
•Keyword frequencies
Patterns of Activity over Time
•Conversation vs. follower network
•Dissemination of RTs vs. @replies
Networks of @Replies(short/long term)
•Keyword analysis over time
•Keyword co-occurrence maps
Keyword / Key Phrase Mapping
Crisis Communication Research in the CCI
Jan.-June 2011
– Focus on uses of social media during the Qld Floods
– Archive of tweets using #qldfloods hashtag
– Analysis
• Volume of tweets over time
• @replies and retweets: key actors and their networks
• URLs: key media resources, user-uploaded images and videos
• Emergence and uptake of hashtags and other user conventions
• Content analysis: themes and purposes over time
Twitter and the Queensland Floods: #qldfloods tweets
10 Jan. 2011 11 Jan. 2011 12 Jan. 2011 13 Jan. 201114 Jan. 2011 15 Jan. 2011
Local Focus: #qldfloods from Toowoomba to Brisbane
• Toowoomba vs. Lockyer/Grantham vs. Ipswich vs. Brisbane slide
10 Jan. 2011 11 Jan. 2011 12 Jan. 2011 13 Jan. 201114 Jan. 2011 15 Jan. 2011
Twitter and the Queensland Floods: #qldfloods posters
retweet feeds
mainstream media
Qld Police
Twitter and the Queensland Floods: #qldfloods @replies
mainstream media
authorit ies
Twitter and the Christchurch Earthquake: #eqnz @replies
mainstream media
authorit ies
ut i l i t ies
Key Accounts over Time
@QPSmedia as Central #qldfloods Information Source
Case study: @QPSMedia
#qldfloods Network Map – Most Active Accounts Only(Degree >= 15 / Node size: indegree / node colour: outdegree)
Twitter and the Queensland Floods
• First lessons:– #qldfloods as coordinating tool – one central hashtag
• Go where the users are – and help establish hashtag
• Plus inventive additions – e.g. @QPSmedia #Mythbuster tweets
– Most activity by individuals – but key official accounts cut through• Enable easy retweeting and sharing of messages
• Respond and engage – value voluntary contributions from ‘average’ users
– Mainstream media are important in social media environments, too• Twitter as an amplifier of key messages
– Twitter vs. Facebook – which works when?
Twitter and the Japanese Tsunami: Beyond the #Hashtag
Twitter Events in Perspective: Comparing the Main 24h
Next Steps in Crisis Communication Research
– More forensics: successes and failures, especially rumours and misinformation
– Further comparison with other recent natural disasters
– Comparing mainstream and social media coverage
– Social context: in-depth interviews with residents
– Direct engagement with emergency services, government and media
Beyond Crises
• Where to from here? Further applications:– Identifying overall Twitter participation patterns – key themes, key users– How does information travel across the Twittersphere?– How can we ensure and enhance the distribution of important messages?
• What is the structure of the Twitter community?– Mapping online publics: network structure, clusters, interconnections, themes– Identifying key participants: opinion leaders, information hubs, connectors– Change over time: fluidity of network structures, response to stimuli
• How does Twitter sit in the wider media ecology?– Use of materials from elsewhere: distribution of attention through links– Interconnections between Twitter and other media: tweets about TV,
newspapers, ...
Understanding Australian Twitter Use
• What is the Australian Twitter userbase?– Large-scale snowballing project– Starting from selected hashtag communities
(e.g. #ausvotes, #qldfloods, #masterchef)– Identifying participating users, testing for ‘Australianness’:
• Timezone setting, location information, profile information
– Retrieving follower/followee information for each account (very slow)
• Progress update:– ~550,000 Australian users identified so far
South Australia
Wine
Music
Football (soccer)
Football (rugby)Sports
Media, Journalism,
Politics
Twitter Celebrities
Follower/followee network:~40,000 Australian Twitter users(of ~440,000 known accounts so far) in-degree 20+, dark lines = mutual,colour = indegree, size = outdegree
http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ @snurb_dot_info@jeanburgess
Image by campoalto