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'Big Data'

Snurb — Thursday 9 April 2015 11:42

Call for PhD Applications: Social Media and Public Communication

Politics | Journalism | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship |

We’re now looking for the second PhD student associated with my current ARC Future Fellowship project. The PhD student will receive an annual stipend of A$25,849 over the three years of the PhD project. If you’re interested in and qualified for the PhD project, please contact me by 1 May 2015, directly at a.bruns@qut.edu.au with your CV, names of two referees, and a detailed statement addressing the Eligibility Requirements below. We’ll select the candidate on this basis, and will then ask you to formally apply for the PhD place through the QUT Website.

Full details are below – please …

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Snurb — Saturday 15 November 2014 21:34

Crowdsourced Images in the Boston Marathon Attack

Journalism | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Crisis Communication | Twitter | ECREA 2014 |

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Anssi Männistö, who shifts our focus to the Boston Marathon bomb attack. Mobile social media played an important role in covering this attact: tweets and mobile media were no longer just sources of information, but also tools to very facts and photos and to identify potential suspects, through image recognition software and other facilities.

In Boston, journalists rapidly discovered the first reports and images of the attack from Twitter, and soon came to use them in their own coverage. Such material was then used in official investigations, unofficial hunts for the culprits …

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Snurb — Saturday 15 November 2014 21:33

Visualisations for Doing Good with Data

'Big Data' | ECREA 2014 |

Ok, so I've boycotted the stupidly early 8.30 a.m. paper session at ECREA 2014. My day starts, consequently, with a paper by Helen Kennedy and Rosemary Hill, whose focus is on data visualisation. Data-driven decision-making remains out of reach for those who cannot work with the data directly, and data visualisation may help here.

There are now visualisation agencies such as Periscopic which specialise in data visualisation for social good. The idea here is to mobilise data graphically, to make data useful to a greater audience. Such visualisations include the work of The Guardian's Data Blog, for example …

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Snurb — Thursday 13 November 2014 22:43

Framing the Big Data Debate

'Big Data' | Social Media | Twitter | ECREA 2014 |

The final speaker in this session at ECREA 2014 is Christian Pentzold, whose focus is on the discussions around the 2013 affair about the use of protesters' mobile phone data by police in Saxony. There is a discursive social construction of the term 'big data', and different frames of big data have emerged so far.

Transmedia discourse is combining a number of different conceptualisations, and this enables a number of different analytical perspectives and approaches; the speed of the dynamic reconfiguration of these different modes also affects how analysis may proceed.

How can we use slower analytic methods to make …

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Snurb — Thursday 13 November 2014 22:42

Civilising the Discourse about Big Data

'Big Data' | Social Media | Twitter | ECREA 2014 |

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Frederic Guerrero-Solé, whose focus is on big data on Twitter. Few people know at this point what 'big data' actually means; what discourse about big data are we constructing here? So is big data just a marketing concept? The uses of big data in social networks have largely shaped our understanding of the big data concept; is there therefore a common discourse about big data at least in a social network such as Twitter?

Frederic's project gathered some 400,000 tweets mentioning the term big data or the hashtag #bigdata, and explored …

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Snurb — Thursday 13 November 2014 22:42

The Emergence of Data Activism

'Big Data' | ECREA 2014 |

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Stefania Milan, who begins by noting the social media response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, using Ushahidi Maps as a key tool for mapping the local situation. This is a positive example of how civil society can put big data to good use: what forms of massive data collection are possible here, and how can they be used for good?

There has been an industrial revolution of data, but citizens face a paradox, as moral codes are not yet aligned with social practices. Big data may mean big control, but also more opportunities …

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Snurb — Thursday 13 November 2014 22:42

The Latest Map of the Australian Twittersphere

'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | ECREA 2014 |

Our own paper on mapping the Australian Twittersphere was next at ECREA 2014, and I've posted the slides below. Audio to come later, I hope!

Mapping a National Twittersphere: A 'Big Data' Analysis of Australian Twitter User Networks from Axel Bruns

 

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Snurb — Thursday 13 November 2014 22:41

The Construction of Audiences through Big Data Analytics

'Big Data' | Social Media | ECREA 2014 |

The first ECREA 2014 panel session is one that we have a paper in as well, but we start with Göran Bolin, whose interest is in the construction of audiences through big data-driven research. There is now a large discussion of what constitutes big data, of course, but Göran is bypassing this, focussing instead on the uses of such data to envisage media users.

Much such data are drawn from social media, but it seems that the social is getting further estranged through this; big data means an intensification of statistical and quantitative approaches, and to some extent constitutes a …

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Snurb — Thursday 6 November 2014 11:50

Exploring the Global Demographics of Twitter (AoIR 2014)

'Big Data' | Social Media | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | AoIR 2014 |

Association of Internet Researchers conference 2014

Exploring the Global Demographics of Twitter

Axel Bruns, Darryl Woodford, and Troy Sadkowsky

  • 22-25 Oct. 2014 – Association of Internet Researchers conference, Daegu
Exploring the Global Demographics of Twitter from Axel Bruns

In spite of the substantial international success of Twitter as a social media platform, reliable information about its userbase is surprisingly difficult to come by. Other than the 232 million “monthly active users” reported in the company’s disclosures to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of its listing on the stock exchange, and some high-level breakdowns of account numbers across a number of key markets, most other assumptions about the Twitter userbase remain guesswork or are based on surveys with comparatively limited sample sizes. This paper takes a different approach to exploring the demographics of the platform: by undertaking a long-term crawl process across the entire Twitter user ID numberspace, we have gathered the publicly available details on every Twitter user account created between the platform’s emergence in 2006 and the conclusion of our crawl in 2013. By identifying the key patterns within this database of some 872 million accounts existing during our collection period, we are able to provide a much more comprehensive overview of Twitter’s footprint across the globe, its patterns of growth, and of typical user careers as listeners, followers, hubs and communicators than has been possible in any previous study.

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Snurb — Thursday 6 November 2014 11:47

‘Big Social Data’ in Context: Connecting Social Media Data and Other Sources (ACSPRI 2014)

'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | ACSPRI 2014 |

Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Incorporated (ACSPRI) Social Science Methodology Conference 2014

‘Big Social Data’ in Context: Connecting Social Media Data and Other Sources

Axel Bruns and Tim Highfield

  • 7-10 Dec. 2014 – Australian Consortium for Social and Political Research Incorporated (ACSPRI) Social Science Methodology Conference, Sydney
‘Big Social Data’ in Context: Connecting Social Media Data and Other Sources from Axel Bruns

The current “computational turn” (Berry, 2012) in media and communication studies is driven largely by the increased programmatic accessibility of large and very large sources of structured data on the online activities and content of Internet users – and here, especially of data from platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. Such ‘big social data’ are being used to examine the social media response to issues and events ranging from national elections (Larsson & Moe, 2014) through natural disasters (Bruns et al., 2012) to popular entertainment (Highfield et al., 2013), and in doing so tell a detailed and real-time story of how large populations of Internet users engage with the topics that concern them.

The study of user activities in specific social media spaces alone, however, necessarily isolates such activities from their wider context. Self-evidently, users’ activities do not remain limited to Facebook or Twitter alone: they cross over between these and other social media platforms, and intersect with other online and offline activities. To develop a more comprehensive picture of how citizens engage with and respond to current issues, even only in an online environment, it would therefore be necessary to connect and correlate the data sourced from social media platforms with data from a range of other sources which describe other aspects of the overall online experience.

This paper describes the approach and presents early outcomes from one such initiative to put ‘big social data’ in a wider context. As part of an ARC Future Fellowship project, we draw both on large, longitudinal Twitter and Facebook datasets which describe how Australian social media users engage with and share the news articles published by a range of leading Australian news and commentary sites, and on complementary, representative data from the market research company Experian Hitwise which track, through anonymised data collection at the ISP level across millions of households, what terms Australian Internet users are searching for, and how their attention is distributed across available Websites.

The combination of these sources provides an important new dimension beyond mere social media metrics themselves: in aggregate, our sources show the extent to which users’ searching and browsing activities around current events (which generally remain invisible to their peers) correlate with active news sharing and dissemination activities (which are designed to alert peers to an issue), and how such correlations differ across different themes and events, and different social media platforms. This constitutes an important further methodological and conceptual advance not only for the study of social media, but for media and communication studies as such.

Berry, D., ed. (2012). Understanding Digital Humanities. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Bruns, A., Burgess, J., Crawford, K., & Shaw, F. (2012). #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods. Brisbane: ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, 2012. Retrieved from http://cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf.

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

Larson, A.O., & Moe, H. (2014). Twitter in Politics and Elections: Insights from Scandinavia. In Weller, K., Bruns, A., Burgess, J., Mahrt, M., & Puschmann, C., eds., Twitter and Society. (K. Weller, A. Bruns, J. Burgess, M. Mahrt, & C. Puschmann, Eds.). New York: Peter Lang. 319-30.

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