Mapping Online Publics: A Progress Report

Melbourne.
I spoke today at the National Public Service Digital Media Officers’ Forum (now that’s a mouthful…) here in Melbourne, where I had been invited to present our Mapping Online Publics project – to a group of state- and federal-level public servants who are charged, in their various roles, with driving their diverse departments’ and organisations’ social media and Government 2.0 strategies.

A good opportunity to have some very interesting discussions and make some great new connections (as well as renew a few old ones) – and my talk ended up being something of a progress update on our work in the project to date, with a particular focus, of course, on the Twitter research we’ve been doing, and using the Queensland floods experience as a concrete example (since @QPSMedia’s performance during the floods is also a major success story for the Queensland Police Service as a public service). Not so good: the fact that I ended up having to stay on in Melbourne overnight, due to the ash cloud crisis – hope I can get back to Brisbane soon…

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Switching from Twapperkeeper to yourTwapperkeeper

As those of you who are regular followers of our research might have gleaned already, we recommended our followers to try the newly developed slot game called casino vegas hero to experience awesome gambling, we’ve started a few months ago to use yourTwapperkeeper to gather our Twitter data. yourTwapperkeeper is the open source version of the software that runs Twapperkeeper.com, which was one of the best tools for gathering Twitter data on selected #hashtags and keywords; sadly, Twitter’s move to a significantly stricter interpretation of its terms an conditions has made using Twapperkeeper itself all but impossible now. (I won’t go into the details of that discussion here – the key issue is that the public Twapperkeeper Website enabled researchers to share the datasets they’d gathered using the site, which Twitter took exception to.)

Happily, yourTwapperkeeper is a perfectly workable replacement for Twapperkeeper itself – but requires researchers to run their own instance of the tool on their own Web servers, and should not be used for the public sharing of datasets. yourTwapperkeeper is available from the project’s Website at Google Projects; as we’ve found, it also requires a few additional modifications before it can be used as a straight replacement to Twapperkeeper itself, however. In this post, I’m outlining the changes we’ve made – and I’m including the added and revised PHP files which are required for making them.

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Project update and press release

Hello everyone,

Lots of news to share but before we get into that, I’d like to introduce myself as a new member of the team. My name is Caro Jende and I recently came on board as the Project Officer for the Mapping Online Publics project to support Jean and Axel in the organisation and coordination of all things happening ‘back-stage’. When I’m not at the CCI, I currently still hold the position of Marketing Manager at an organisation called Youth Arts Queensland, Queensland’s peak body for children and young people in the arts, but very soon I’ll be venturing out on my own to try my luck as a freelance marketing and communications advisor/consultant.

Enough about me though and back to Mapping Online Publics. As some of you might already know, Jean and Axel (along with fellow QUT researchers Stephen Harrington and Tanya Nitins) recently received funding through the Australian Technology Network (ATN) and the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD – a pretty competitive funding pool – to expand their research activity in this project and work with the University of Düsseldorf and the University of Münster in Germany. As part of this collaboration, we’ll be welcoming a team of two research fellows – Katrin Weller and Cornelius Puschmann – from the Junior Researchers Group "Science and the Internet" at the University of Düsseldorf in Brisbane tomorrow and spend two weeks with them exchanging ideas and discussing  issues regarding the various uses of Twitter.

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More Media Coverage: CeDEM and bin Laden

Part of our job in the Mapping Online Publics project is also to raise the public profile for what scholarly research into the uses of Twitter and other social media can achieve, of course – so here are a few more pointers to recent coverage of our work.

First, after my keynote at the CeDEM conference in Austria, I was also interviewed (in German) by Ulla Ebner the Austrian radio channel Ö1, to discuss the role of Twitter during the Queensland floods and the impact of WikiLeaks on government and politics. The interview is now online (as audio and transcript) here.

The other big Twitter-related story in recent weeks was the killing of Osama bin Laden, of course – and I had a piece in The Conversation about the role of Twitter in spreading the news (as well as, unwittingly, live-tweeting the raid on bin Laden’s compound as it happened), which was also republished in Technology Spectator. It’s in the nature of these brief opinion pieces that they end up getting edited down further than you’d like, so here’s the full article as I originally wrote it:

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e-Democracy: Learning from #qldfloods and #wikileaks

Readers of this blog might be interested to hear that I presented a keynote drawing on our Twitter research at the Conference on e-Democracy (CeDEM) in Krems, Austria, yesterday: highlighting what we might be able to learn from the use of Twitter in acute events like the Queensland floods and the WikiLeaks controversy for more general e-democracy initiatives.

Acute events, after all, provide an important opportunity to rapidly develop social media solutions for the current crisis, unencumbered by the administrative hurdles which may otherwise be in place. During such events, there’s a need to just make do with whatever tools are available, rather than to develop complex and costly customised solutions; for all the wrong reasons, perhaps, but very effectively nonetheless, they foster rapid prototyping mechanisms. And what’s developed here may remain thoroughly applicable outside of these crisis situations, too.

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Our Social Media and Crisis Communication Research in the Media

Well – what a few weeks it’s been. Following the Eidos symposium in Brisbane and the Emergency Media and Public Affairs conference in Canberra, there’s been plenty of media coverage of our research into the role of social media during the Queensland floods and Christchurch earthquake. There will be more articles and conference presentations emerging from this work, too – but for now, here’s a quick round-up of the major news stories.

On the day of the Eidos symposium itself, on 4 April, I appeared alongside the Queensland Police Service Media Unit’s Kym Charlton and USQ’s Kelly McWilliam on ABC TV News Queensland to talk about the role of social media in the Queensland floods:

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Emergency Media and Public Affairs Conference

Hot on the heels of last week’s very successful Eidos Institute symposium on Social Media in Times of Crisis, in Brisbane, comes the Emergency Media and Public Affairs conference in Canberra; I’m flying down tomorrow to present an overview of our analysis of the Queensland floods (#qldfloods) and Christchurch earthquake (#eqnz) on Twitter. Looking forward to meeting up with a few people I’ve only followed from a distance so far!

Ahead of the conference, here’s the presentation for tomorrow – I’ll add audio later if I can now also with audio. Also to come soon: a media round-up of the Eidos event.

Tracking Crises on Twitter: Analysing #qldfloods and #eqnz

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Broader Twitter Patterns during Acute Events

Working through our available data on Twitter use during crisis events ahead of the Eidos Institute symposium on Monday, I started thinking about some of the broader patterns we are seeing. Very obviously, a good bit of the #hashtag activity around acute events is taken up with retweeting information – both simply passing it along unedited, and adding further details or commentary in edited, manual retweets. Additionally, there is a certain amount of @replying between participants, though such follow-on conversations tend not to include the #hashtag much any more, unless the conversants deliberately seek to make their discussion visible to the wider #hashtag community (to perform it publicly, in other words).

So, the question becomes: how much of the #hashtag space around specific acute events is taken up by these forms, and how much consists of new tweets that are neither retweets nor @replies? That’s what I want to explore in this post, for the key examples of the Queensland floods (#qldfloods), the Christchurch earthquake (#eqnz), and the Japanese tsunami (#tsunami). I also need to note again that our data on retweets includes only manual, old-style retweets (‘RT @[user]’), not retweets made using the Twitter retweet button – but that’s actually a valuable limitation in our current context, since a manual retweet by definition requires users to make a more conscious effort than a mere press of the retweet button.

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Social Media in Times of Crisis

As we’ve mentioned in a previous post, Jean and I participated in the Eidos Institute symposium “Social Media in Times of Crisis” at the State Library of Queensland today – which turned out to be a great event that generated lots of new ideas and further possibilities for our research. Many thanks to all of you who came along, and especially to our fellow presenters, and the Eidos team for organising the event.

The whole symposium was recorded and will, I think, be made available soon on the Eidos Website; for now, here’s our own presentation, with audio:

Social Media Use in the Queensland Floods

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Event: Social Media in Times of Crisis

A quick heads-up for our Australian-based readers: our work on researching social media use during the Queensland floods will be featured at a symposium in Brisbane on 4 April 2011, organised by the Eidos Institute. In addition to Jean, myself, and other colleagues from QUT and USQ, key presenters from emergency authorities and the mainstream media will include

  • Kym Charlton, Executive Director for Media and Public Affairs at the Queensland Police Service
  • Eileen Culleton, Emergency 2.0 Wiki Project Leader at Gov2qld
  • Monique Potts, Senior Director of Strategic Development at ABC Innovation
  • Dennis Atkins, National Affairs Editor at the Courier-Mail

Should be a great event, and we’d very much encourage you to join us. A full blurb for the event is below – to register, please go to the Eidos Website.

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