I spent most of last week at the Digital Humanities Australasia conference in Canberra (see my liveblog coverage), where I presented the latest iteration of our map of the Australian Twitter follower/followee network. This is now based on a total dataset of some 950,000 users, from which we’ve selected the most connected 120,000 for visualisation. …
Continue reading “Many Maps of the Australian Twittersphere”
As we count down to the Queensland state election date, I’ve just published a new piece about the Twitter campaign in The Conversation – head over to the site to read it there. The centrepiece of the story is this graph of @mentions of the two leaders’ accounts throughout the election campaign, though – it …
Continue reading “Mid-Week #qldvotes Update: How the Leaders Compare”
There’s just one more week to go until the end of the 2012 Queensland state election campaign – and as I write this, the tenor of the mainstream media coverage is that we’re heading for a landslide election win for the conservative LNP. So, let’s take another look at the way the election has played …
Continue reading “Queensland Election, Week 4: All Over But the Shouting?”
Having caught up with developments in week 2 in the previous post, let’s bring the story up to date by looking at activity patterns on Twitter during week 3 of the Queensland state election. This post covers the period of 5-11 Mar. 2012, then (except that 11 March isn’t quite over yet, so we’ll be …
Continue reading “Queensland Election, Week 3: The Twitter Story to Date”
OK, so much for my plan to post a weekly update on the way the Queensland election is playing our on Twitter: I spent most of week 2 at a research workshop in Sydney, and didn’t get around to posting an update that weekend. So, this weekend, you get two for the price of one: …
Continue reading “Queensland Election, Week 2: Some More Twitter Patterns”
There will be another post on the continuing Queensland election campaign soon, but before we get to that, I wanted to push out another quick snippet of analysis which I’ve been hoping to get to for some time. For several months now, we’ve been capturing tweets which include links to a number of major Australian …
Continue reading “Does The Australian’s Paywall Affect Link Sharing?”
So, after a long ‘phoney campaign’ over the past months, the first week of the Queensland state election campaign proper is finally behind us – even if it has been largely overshadowed by the federal Labor leadership ructions. Following up on my first post examining the Twitter profiles of the ALP and LNP party leaders …
Continue reading “Queensland Election, Week 1: Some Twitter Patterns”
Well, the Queensland state election is about to start in earnest: Premier Anna Bligh is expected to visit the Governor tomorrow to ask her to resolve parliament and call an election for the end of March. As we’re approaching that time, I’ve been starting to get a few media enquiries about the role social media …
Continue reading “Queensland Politicians on Twitter: Some Initial Observations”
When working with Twitter data, one of the most interesting questions is always what URLs tweets are linking to. As Twitter users discuss any given topic or issue, the URLs they share provide us with an indication of the online media they’re drawing on for information and/or entertainment – and by counting which sites appear …
About a month ago I introduced my new Gawk script metrify.awk, which generates a wide range of Twitter metrics for a given Twapperkeeper/yourTwapperkeeper hashtag or keyword archive. Even as I was writing those posts, though – and certainly while playing with the language metrics I discussed in my last post -, I started to find …
