Tracking Twitter: yourTwapperkeeper and Other Options

Well, it was about time we refreshed the look of Mapping Online Publics – hope you like it… A few posts on recent activities have been held up while we were working on the redesign, so expect some catch-up articles over the next little while. First off the rank: with one of our colleagues at …

Resolving Short URLs: A New Approach

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 …

More Twitter Metrics: Metrify Revisited

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 …

Creating Basic Twitter Language Metrics

OK, this may be a somewhat esoteric subject for researchers who mainly work with Twitter data from specific countries and cultures, but over the past few weeks I’ve been working on a paper that analyses Twitter activities in the #egypt and #libya hashtags – and as part of that work, I’ve been interested in exploring …

Twapperkeeper and Beyond: A Reminder

Those of you who have followed our adventures in Twitter research for some time now will know that we’ve relied to a significant extent on Joe John O’Brien III’s excellent Twapperkeeper as a tool for capturing tweets. Twapperkeeper (as a stand-alone, free Web-based service) no longer exists in its original form, however – though some …

Taking Twitter Metrics to a New Level (Part 4)

Update: revision 1.2 of metrify.awk is now available (still at the link below), and introduces some further functionality, which is outlined here. This is the final instalment of my four-part introduction to the metrify.awk script for generating detailed metrics for specific Twapperkeeper/yourTwapperkeeper hashtag archives. Over the last couple of posts, we’ve mainly dealt with overall …

Taking Twitter Metrics to a New Level (Part 3)

Update: revision 1.2 of metrify.awk is now available (still at the link below), and introduces some further functionality, which is outlined here. Over the past couple of posts, I’ve introduced our new metrify.awk Twitter metrics script, and looked at the first of the three metrics tables produced by the script. Let’s move on now to …

Taking Twitter Metrics to a New Level (Part 2)

Update: I’ve clarified/corrected some of the details relating to the percentile metrics contained in the first table which metrify.awk generates. Update 2: revision 1.2 of metrify.awk adds further functionality in addition to what is described below. These changes are detailed here. In the previous post, I’ve introduced metrify.awk, our new multi-purpose tool for generating Twitter …

Taking Twitter Metrics to a New Level (Part 1)

So, 2011 is finally over – and what a year it’s been. While the confluence of natural disasters, political crises, and other major events has also provided us with the basis for a new research programme in crisis communication, let’s hope that 2012 is a little less intense, please… To start the new year on …

Twitter Research Methods

Following on from the “World According to Twitter” research workshop at QUT, today we presented our research methods at a pre-conference workshop at Communities & Technologies 2011. This was probably the most extensive presentation of our work on Twitter research to date – including a live demonstration of how to work with basic yourTwapperkeeper datasets. …