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

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.

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

• 13 Nov. 2014 – European Communication Conference (ECREA), Lisbon

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

Association of Internet Researchers conference (AoIR 2014)

Mapping Social TV Audiences: The Footprints of Leading Shows in the Australian Twittersphere

Axel Bruns, Darryl Woodford, Tim Highfield, and Katie Prowd

• 22-25 Oct. 2014 – Association of Internet Researchers conference, Daegu

Drawing on the results of a long-term research project into the network structure of the Australian Twittersphere, combined with an investigation of audience participation through social media in selected reality TV and political debate shows, this paper maps the location of the Twitter communities participating in the social TV components of the selected shows onto the underlying follower/followee network structure of the Australian national Twittersphere. In doing so, it addresses questions about the homology or distinctions between the social TV audiences for the different shows; the correlation between existing follower/followee relationships and participation in specific social TV activities; and the effects of Twitter activity related to specific shows in making these shows visible to the entire national Twitter network. The development of such network-based approaches to the quantification and visualisation of social TV engagement makes another important to the development of reliable and generally applicable metrics for social television.

Australia New Zealand Workshop on Campaign Management and Political Marketing (CMPM 2014)

Twitter in the 2013 Australian Election

Axel Bruns

• 17-18 July 2014 – Australia New Zealand Workshop on Campaign Management and Political Marketing, Sydney