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ECREA 2014

European Communication Conference (ECREA) 2014, Lisbon

The Construction of Audiences through Big Data Analytics

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 shift in the nature of scholarly enquiry, focussing on mapping networked accumulations. Such accumulations stem from the metrics produced by social media platforms, for example (such as like and friend counts); and interesting experiments are being conducted by taking away such metrics and thinking through how this changes the experience of such spaces.

Reconsidering New Media's Capacity for Empowerment

The second ECREA 2014 plenary speaker this morning is Tristan Mattelart, whose interest is in the transnationalisation of the news. He begins by noting the ambivalent nature of the notion of empowerment, which has been used in the past by disenfranchised groups to raise the social conscience in order to gain more power; but more recently it has been adopted by neoliberal groups, for whom it now simply means increasing the productivity of marginalised people.

Such changes can be seen in the characterisation of Web 2.0, which has also been described – by authors like Howard Rheingold – as an empowering technology. But to find examples of such notions, we could go back further, to a time when international radio broadcasts – for example into Eastern bloc countries – were seen as empowering local populations; ideology was one of the main pillars of authoritarian regimes, but it rested on very unstable foundations. Dissidents sought to establish independent spaces that allowed them to live within the truth, and international radio broadcasts contributed to the development of such spaces; they were the means to construct such spaces and to disseminate dissident information.

Recovering the Political Commons

Well, it's mid-November, so this must be Lisbon. I'm at the European Communication Conference (ECREA), which starts today with a double plenary session, followed by our QUT Social Media Research Group paper presenting the latest version of our map of the Australian Twittersphere (now based on 2.8 million known accounts).

But before we get to this, the first plenary speaker is Natalie Fenton. She begins by noting the need for scholarly work to have a tangible impact beyond the academy, especially in the current climate of austerity; how can we live decent academic lives that contribute to the flourishing of humanity, that enable a good political life? If Thomas Piketty's analysis of contemporary capitalism is correct, and wealth is increasingly concentrated amongst a small and shrinking elite, how do we address that astounding, damaging inequality?

Mapping a National Twittersphere: A ‘Big Data’ Analysis of Australian Twitter User Networks (ECREA 2014)

European Communication Conference (ECREA) 2014

Mapping a National Twittersphere: A ‘Big Data’ Analysis of Australian Twitter User Networks

Axel Bruns, Darryl Woodford, Troy Sadkowsky, and Tim Highfield

Twitter research to date has focussed mainly on the study of isolated events, as described for example by specific hashtags or keywords relating variously to elections (Larsson & Moe, 2012), natural disasters (Mendoza et al., 2010), entertainment (Highfield et al., 2013) and sporting events (Bruns et al., 2014), and other moments of heightened activity in the network. This limited focus is determined in part by the limitations placed on large-scale access to Twitter data by Twitter, Inc. itself. By contrast, only a handful of studies – usually by researchers associated with commercially funded research organisations or with Twitter, Inc. itself – have utilised the Twitter ‘firehose’ or similar more comprehensive sources of data to explore broader patterns of traffic flows or follower connections on the platform (e.g. Leetaru et al., 2013).

This project builds on a long-term, large-scale analysis of the global Twitter userbase which has managed to identify within the over 725 million global registered Twitter accounts some 2.5 million Australian accounts (by matching profile details such as location, description, and timezone against a set of relevant criteria). Further, we analysed the follower/followee connections of these 2.5 million accounts and from this developed a first comprehensive map of account relationships within the Australian Twittersphere. In-depth network analysis of this map reveals the existence of a range of clusters of especially tightly interconnected users, linked to each other by other accounts acting as bridges between the clusters. In turn, qualitative exploration of the leading account’s profiles in each cluster provides an indication of the various areas of thematic focus which have determined the formation of these clusters, and their association with other clusters in the same network vicinity. Further correlation with other relevant profile data (including the creation date for each account, its level of tweeting activity, and the date of the account’s last tweet) offers additional opportunities to trace the emergence and growing complexity of the Australian Twittersphere over time, from the earliest adopters of the platform to its most recent users, and to filter the overall network for the most active and most persistent users.

This study represents the first ever comprehensive investigation of the development of a national Twittersphere as an entity in its own right. While the global nature of Twitter as a social media platform means that Australian accounts will also be connected with their counterparts in other countries, it is still to be expected that shared interests and identity lead to the majority of connections between accounts to occur within the same national user population, and our analysis of these connection patterns provides an important indicator of the themes around which these connections crystallise, as well as of the longitudinal development of these clusters of interests.

Bruns, A., Weller, K., & Harrington, S. (2014). Twitter and Sports: Football Fandom in Emerging and Established Markets. In K. Weller, A. Bruns, J. Burgess, M. Mahrt, & C. Puschmann (Eds.), Twitter and Society (pp. 263–280). New York: Peter Lang.

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

Larsson, A.O., & Moe, H. (2011). Studying Political Microblogging: Twitter Users in the 2010 Swedish Election Campaign. New Media & Society, 14(5). doi:10.1177/1461444811422894

Leetaru, K., Wang, S., Cao, G., Padmanabhan, A., & Shook, E. (2013). Mapping the Global Twitter Heartbeat: The Geography of Twitter. First Monday, 18(5). doi:10.5210/fm.v18i5.4366

Mendoza, M., Poblete, B., & Castillo, C. (2010) Twitter under Crisis: Can We Trust What We RT? Paper presented at Social Media Analytics, KDD '10 Workshops, Washington, DC, 25 July 2010. Available from: http://research.yahoo.com/files/mendoza_poblete_castillo_2010_twitter_terremoto.pdf

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