Keynote presented by Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess at the Düsseldorf Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Twitter Analysis, 14 Sep. 2011.

1. Mapping Online Publics on Twitter Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation Queensland University of Technology Brisbane, Australia a.bruns / je.burgess@qut.edu.au @snurb_dot_info / @jeanburgess http://mappingonlinepublics.net/

2. 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’

3. 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.

4. #hashtags on Twitter Hashtag =‘#’ + alphanumeric characters: Automatic tracking & aggregation of a topic, represented with a hyperlink Originally a (lead) user innovation, later integrated into platform Simple, adaptive and generative Can coordinate, render visible, and constitute publics

5. #hashtag Publics Publics: Attend to matters of shared concern with some level of co-awareness Varied in intensity and temporality Emergent, constituted via discourse & affect #hashtag publics: Not all hashtags constitute publics; Twitter doesn’t ‘contain’ publics What are the various patterns in the dynamics of different hashtag-based publics? What might account for these differences?

6. Data Gathering yourTwapperkeeper: API-based data capture 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 for Researching Twitter

7. #ausvotes (July-Aug. 2010)

8. #royalwedding (29 Apr. 2011)

9. #eqnz (Feb./Mar. 2011)

10. #qldfloods: @QPSmedia (Jan. 2011)

11. #ausvotes: Leaders

12. #ausvotes: Themes

13. #spill (23 June 2010)

14. #GoBackSBS (June/July 2011)

15. Comparative Metrics

16. Towards a Typology of Twitter Uses How are hashtags used (during acute events)? Gatewatching: Finding and sharing information about breaking news (before the mainstream media do?) Ad hoc publics: many URLs, many retweets (even unedited) Audiencing: Shared experience of major (foreseen) events Imagined community of fellow participants: few URLs, limited retweeting What other uses are there? Continuing discussions (#auspol, #bundesliga, …) Memes (#ghettohurricanenames, …) Emotive hashtags (#fail, #win, #headdesk, …) What about keywords?

17. Beyond Hashtags Publics on Twitter: Micro: @reply and retweet conversations Meso: hashtag ‘communities’ Macro: follower/followee networks  Multiple overlapping publics / networks What drives their formation and dissipation? How do they interact and interweave? How are they interleaved with the wider media ecology? Twitter doesn’t contain publics: publics transcend Twitter

18. Understanding Australian Twitter Use What is the Australian Twitteruserbase? 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

19. The Australian Twittersphere Follower/followee network:~150,000 Australian Twitter users(of ~550,000 known accounts so far) colour = outdegree, size = indegree

20. The Australian Twittersphere

21. http://mappingonlinepublics.net/ @snurb_dot_info @jeanburgess