Australian Political Blogs and the Obama Inauguration

Brisbane.
The third speaker in this session at ANZCA 2009 is Tim Highfield, who works on a comparative study of political blogs in Australia and France (and is one of my PhD students). He focusses here on the Australian side and its reaction to the inauguration of Barack Obama. The project tracks some 245 blogs and news Websites in Australia, and extracts from these each post (and its links) as they become available online. These data are then quantitatively analysed for keyword and link patterns.

The Obama inauguration was a major political event, of course, and provided a useful case study for this work; other such samples could be the swine flu epidemic or the 'utegate' controversy storm in a teacup. Interestingly, only about 50 blogs in the population published a post or more during the two weeks surrounding the inauguration (possibly due to the fact that January is a major holiday month in Australia). There was no major spike on inauguration day itself, either.

Tim used the Leximancer textual analysis software to examine the key terms these sites used. Mainstream media sites (tracked for comparison) appeared in concert with terms such as USA, African-American, George Bush, inauguration, etc., much as one would expect; overall, such topics made up for only a minor cluster in the overall coverage of news events. In the blogs, Obama similarly was only a minor cluster, and appeared in concert with terms such as climate change, global crisis, economy, etc.

Tim also studied a number of key sites individually - Larvatus Prodeo, for example, associated Obama with business, power, emissions, and speech; On Line Opinion connected Obama with climate change, energy, and economy; Andrew Bartlett used terms such as candidate, country, and public; and Crikey highlighted terms such as inaguration, speech, history, and change. For none of these sites, Obama was a truly central topic, though.

This is a pilot study for further, more detailed work, of course, and focussed only on blogs, of course (there may have been more coverage on Twitter, for example. Further methodological work will also be necessary. What is already apparent is that international events are certainly present in Australian blogs, especially where there is Australian involvement. Domestic events tend to overshadow these, however. It will be interesting to find appropriate events to use as case studies in this context, then.

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