Mapping Online Publics

Just to show that we haven’t forgotten about the blog-related aspects of our research work (which have been backgrounded a little by the recent flurry of research around Twitter and crisis communication and/or politics): Jean and I have now published a new book chapter on “Doing Blog Research”, in the Sage collection Research Methods & Methodologies in Education which has been edited by James Arthur, Michael Waring, Robert Coe, and Larry V. Hedges. In spite of the ‘education’ focus of the overall collection, I think our chapter also applies well beyond that field – so hopefully it will be useful to blog researchers out there.

A pre-print of the chapter is available here. And we promise to update you a little more frequently on our blog research in the future, too…

And finally for our series of conference presentations over the past couple of weeks, here’s our talk from the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association conference in Brisbane last week. This was a bit of a strange one, as the conference schedule meant that we had to present it three times – Jean did the first one, and I the other two, alongside Anthony Baxter from Google.org and Gabby Shaw from ABC Innovation. Below are the slides and audio from the second run (my first); Jean tells me the conference also did a video recording of her talk, so it that surfaces somewhere we’ll add a link to it as well.

In keeping with the conference theme, “Media Leadership in Crisis, Disaster and Emergency”, we presented our research into the role of Twitter in the Queensland floods, but focussed here especially also on the intersections between mainstream and social media and the specific contributions of the Australian public broadcaster, the ABC, in this context. This also provided an opportunity again to show some of our research into the overall shape of the Australian Twittersphere (which we shared at the Digital Humanities Australasia conference in Canberra recently), and to examine the specific position of the ABC within it. More on that soon!

We’re doing quite a few presentations of our crisis communication research at the moment. A few days after our ANZDMC presentation, I flew down to Melbourne to run a workshop on social media and disaster resilience together with Chris Fisher from the Queensland state Department for Community Safety, as part of the Disaster Resilient Communities conference.

My contribution to the workshop was to present in some detail the research into uses of Twitter in disasters which we’ve been engaged in, and I’m including the two parts of my presentation below. There was a fair amount of interaction and discussion with the workshop participants during these presentations, but I’ve edited out those discussions from the audio attached to the slides, both because participants were hard to hear on the recording and because they may not want to have their questions and ideas broadcast beyond the workshop itself. Hope the recording makes sense without their contributions.

Continuing the catch-up with recent publications and presentations, I also wanted to share the paper which Jean Burgess and I presented at the Australia New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management conference in Brisbane last week. The paper (slides and audio are below) constitutes our most comprehensive analysis to date of the use of Twitter in the 2010/11 Christchurch earthquakes – focussing especially on the most damaging event on 22 February 2011.

In particular, we examine the evolution of the Twitter user community and its activities over time – both in the short term over the fortnight following the February quake, and in the longer term through a comparison of the four major tremors between September 2010 and December 2011. These repeated events provide us with a useful indication of how Twitter use changes and evolves from one crisis to the next, building on the experience of its users in earlier events – but we do hope that there will be no further major earthquakes in Christchurch which add to this dataset…

In addition to the presentation itself, a full peer-reviewed paper will also be published as part of the ANZDMC proceedings – we’ll add it to this post and list it on our publications page once it’s available.

Well, it was about time we refreshed the look of Mapping Online Publics – hope you like it… A few posts on recent activities have been held up while we were working on the redesign, so expect some catch-up articles over the next little while.

First off the rank: with one of our colleagues at the National Cheng Chi University in Taipei, Eugene Liang (whom Jean and I visited in October last year), I’ve just published a new article in First Monday which reviews some options for tracking user activities on Twitter. Our focus here is largely on doing so in the context of crisis communication, but much of what we have to say also translates to other applications.

My contribution to the paper is to outline what we’ve been able to do by using yourTwapperkeeper (and more details on this are all over this Website, of course), while Eugene takes us beyond that approach to discuss the work which he and his colleagues have done in developing a more comprehensive, custom-made platform for tracking Twitter activities at scale. Abstract below:

Axel Bruns and Eugene Liang Yuxian

During the course of several natural disasters in recent years, Twitter has been found to play an important role as an additional medium for many–to–many crisis communication. Emergency services are successfully using Twitter to inform the public about current developments, and are increasingly also attempting to source first–hand situational information from Twitter feeds (such as relevant hashtags). The further study of the uses of Twitter during natural disasters relies on the development of flexible and reliable research infrastructure for tracking and analysing Twitter feeds at scale and in close to real time, however. This article outlines two approaches to the development of such infrastructure: one which builds on the readily available open source platform yourTwapperkeeper to provide a low–cost, simple, and basic solution; and, one which establishes a more powerful and flexible framework by drawing on highly scaleable, state–of–the–art technology.