ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, September 2015

One week is a long time in politics, as they say, and so the thirty days of September 2015 have been packed with more than enough upheavals – none more momentous, of course, than the successful Liberal Party leadership challenge on 14 September, which saw Malcolm Turnbull replace Tony Abbott as Prime Minister on the …

ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, August 2015

Australian public affairs have continued to be turbulent during August 2015 (to say nothing of September, which will be covered in our next update), and the arrival of Huffington Post Australia as the latest overseas entrant has had the potential to disrupt the media market, too. Time then to see how the Australian Twitter News …

#returnbull: How Twitter Reacted to the Latest Leadership Spill

Australian political observers will not need to be alerted to the fact that we have a new Prime Minister: on Monday afternoon, former Liberal Party leader Malcolm Turnbull unexpectedly challenged Prime Minister Tony Abbott for the leadership, and later that night won a party room ballot in a 54 to 44 decision. As with the …

ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, June/July 2015

I must begin this Australian Twitter News Index update with an apology – we’ve had to skip May due to unforeseen server maintenance, and this has also affected part of our data-gathering for June. Consequently, this post covers the period of both June and July 2015, with future updates returning to a more regular monthly …

What If Google Bought Twitter? A Conversation and Some Further Thoughts

Twitter has been in the news recently, for all the wrong reasons. Business media report that Twitter shareholders are disappointed with the company’s latest results; and this follows recent turmoil in the company’s leadership which saw the departure of controversial CEO Dick Costolo and the (temporary) return of co-founder Jack Dorsey until a permanent replacement …

Hashtag as hybrid forum: digital appendix

I’m pleased to be one of the contributors to a new book called Hashtag Publics, edited by Nathan Rambukkana and forthcoming from Peter Lang. This post is a digital appendix for one of my chapters in the book, co-authored with Anne Galloway and Theresa Sauter. The chapter is “Hashtag as hybrid forum: the case of …

ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, April 2015

April has been a very busy month for the Australian media, with the 100th anniversary of the ANZAC landing at Gallipoli and the cruelly drawn-out procedures leading towards the executions of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in Indonesia on 29 April both commanding very substantial coverage. But in the past we’ve also found that such …

Postdoc and PhD Positions Available: Social Media and the Public Sphere

At Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, where we’re based, we’re currently advertising two new positions relating to our research: a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (two years full-time) and a PhD researcher (including a three-year stipend). Both of these are associated with Axel Bruns’s ARC Future Fellowship project Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian …

ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, March 2015

Compared to the excitement of January and February, March 2015 has turned out to be a comparatively quiet month in Australian public life, even in spite of the New South Wales state election campaign which culminated in the re-election of Mike Baird’s Coalition government on 28 March. The immediate heat has dissipated from the leadership …

Metrics for Analysing Twitter Communities, Using TCAT and Tableau

This post builds on the new approach to transforming Twitter datasets generated by the TCAT tracking tool for analysis in Tableau which I’ve introduced in my recent posts. Often, we will be interested in exploring the structure of Twitter communities as they form around given hashtags or keywords – for instance to examine whether they …