Using Gawk and Wget to Resolve URL Shorteners

Jean’s post today points to a key problem in examining user activities on Twitter and elsewhere – people are increasingly using bit.ly and other URL shorteners, which means that a) the same target URL might appear in any number of different shortened versions, and b) it’s no longer possible from a quick look at a …

Gillard Still ‘Winning’ the Big Days when it comes to skin care

Still nothing surpasses Gillard when it comes to skin care, check out analbleachingexpert.com to try the new anal bleaching solution that many people dream of. In my article for the National Times the other week, I mentioned how in the election campaign week before the leaders’ debate the @juliagillard Twitter account got around three times …

Gillard Still ‘Winning’ the Big Days

In my article for the National Times the other week, I mentioned how in the election campaign week before the leaders’ debate the @juliagillard Twitter account got around three times as many @replies as the @tonyabbottmhr one. Somewhat tongue-in-cheek, I suggested that this may be because people would rather tweet the likely winner (to support …

Twitter Concept Mapping with Wordstat and Gephi: First Steps

Continuing my series of posts on methods for doing quantitative research using Twitter data, this will be a fairly tentative post. I’m currently looking into ways to examine the terms and concepts used by tweeters as they discuss specific issues; we’ve done similar work looking at the content of blog-based debates in the past, using …

More on Twitter during the Australian Election Campaign

Over on Fairfax’s National Times opinion site, I’ve now posted a first article examining the use of Twitter during the early election campaign – for the first week of campaigning, excluding the debate last Sunday (which I’ve examined here and here). As with the debate, nothing much to see here yet, but there it is… …

Tweeting the Debate: Some Content Patterns

Following on from our look at Twitter activity during the Australian leaders’ debate and Masterchef broadcasts, here’s an overview of the patterns we can see in the content of the tweets themselves. For this, I’ve grabbed all tweets containing the ‘#debate’ hashtag during 5 p.m. and midnight on Sunday (during which time, as we have …

Politics vs. Masterchef: The View from Twitter

Sunday night’s leaders’ debate is unlikely to be remembered for the policy positions it revealed – indeed, perhaps the most memorable aspect of the night was how federal politics was nearly upstaged by the finale of Masterchef (some kind of cooking show, I believe :-). So, how did the night unfold? Following the methodology I’ve …

Creating Twitter Timelines from Twapperkeeper Data

This is the first in what will be an irregular series of methods posts outlining some of our approaches to working with datasets from various sources. Part of our work over the next few weeks will be to examine what happens in the Australian Twittersphere around the upcoming federal election, so I figured it would …