Social Media and Emergencies, in German(y)

The German online magazine Politik-Digital, which covers issues relating to politics and the Internet, has just published a lengthy interview with me about the role of Twitter and other social media platforms during recent disasters, and about what German authorities may learn from recent experiences elsewhere – from the Queensland floods to the Christchurch earthquake and through to the Japanese earthquake and tsunami and the continuing nuclear crisis. The interview is in German, so I’m afraid our English-language readers may only be able to try Google Translate to get the gist of it.

For those of you who’ve found our blog through the link in the interview (and for any other newcomers), I thought it might be worth compiling a few links to our most relevant blog posts on these topics. More information on our research methodology is available especially in earlier posts on the blog, too, and we’ve usually included links to them in more recent blog posts.

Queensland floods (#qldfloods):

Christchurch Earthquake (#eqnz):

Cross-Comparison:

Twitter in the Christchurch Earthquake, Pt. 3

We’ve spent the last couple of posts looking at user activity patterns on Twitter during the days following the Christchurch earthquake. Now it’s time to shift our attention to the themes discussed by the #eqnz hashtag community – again with particular attention also to how these themes change over time.

What I’ve done here is to run the complete #eqnz data through the content analysis software WordStat to identify the most common keywords used in tweets. I’ve then picked out a number of these to graph them over time.

Let’s start with the most obvious ones (click on any of these graphs to enlarge):

Continue reading “Twitter in the Christchurch Earthquake, Pt. 3”

Twitter in the Christchurch Earthquake, Pt. 2

Following on from my overview of key tweeting patterns in the Christchurch earthquake in February, in the previous post, I wanted to further explore Alfred Hermida’s idea of Twitter as ‘ambient journalism‘ – or more to the point, examine whether there are any obvious differences between Twitter’s coverage of the immediate earthquake and its long-term discussion of related events.

So, based on the activity patterns we’ve identified in the previous post, I’ve split the #eqnz data into two lots: from the event itself, on 22 Feb. 2011, to 00:00 on 25 Feb., and from 00:00 on 25 Feb. to the end of our dataset (which for the purposes of this analysis runs until 8 March 2011). That’s necessarily an arbitrary division – but 24 Feb. was the last day on which #eqnz activity reached more than 1,000 tweets per hour on multiple occasions; after that, the Twitter discussion continued at a much reduced level (or, as is also likely, diversified into a number of additional hashtags which we’re not tracking here). (Note that there was another brief spike above 1,000 tph in the evening of 1 March, though, as another major aftershock rattled the city.)

Continue reading “Twitter in the Christchurch Earthquake, Pt. 2”

Twitter in the Christchurch Earthquake, Pt. 1

Given the recent focus on this blog on the use of social media during major disasters, a closer look at the use of Twitter during the devastating Christchurch earthquake on 22 Feb. 2011 is long overdue (and sadly, more on the horrible Japanese earthquake and tsunami will follow soon, too). I’m following our previous methodology here – much as we’ve employed it for looking at the Queensland floods and other major events before. However, rather than relying on data from Twapperkeeper (which may not remain available for much longer, given the recent changes in how Twitter governs its data), we’re now using our own install of yourTwapperkeeper, which (with a few tweaks – more on that at another time) I can thoroughly recommend so far.

First, an overall look at the volume of tweets. As soon as news of the earthquake broke, I set our yTK to archive #eqnz, the major hashtag associated with the disaster, so we have data from exactly 10:28:16 (AEST) onwards; the earthquake itself took place at 9:51 AEST, or 12:51 local time. (Working across timezones will be a little confusing in what follows, so I’ll stick with Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST) here – for New Zealand time, add three hours.) In other words, we’re missing only the first 37 minutes here:

Continue reading “Twitter in the Christchurch Earthquake, Pt. 1”

Image sharing in the #qldfloods

In a previous post, I explained how to extract links to known image-hosting services from an archive of tweets, and promised to follow up with a substantial post on image-sharing in the Queensland Floods – this is that post. It’s pretty long, but it does have pictures. Here are the main points:

  1. During the Queensland Floods, we shared and retweeted a lot of images: more than one in every 5 shared links was to an image hosted on one of several image-sharing services.
  2. We overwhelmingly depended on Twitpic and other Twitter-centric image-sharing services to upload and distribute the photographs we took on our smartphones and digital cameras.
  3. The patterns of image-sharing over time seem to match the overall patterns in Twitter activity on the same hashtag, with sharp peaks in both uploading and retweeting early on, followed by a significant drop-off.
  4. Going beyond Twitter, a side excursion to the ‘other’ image-sharing site, Flickr, raises some questions about the role of such services in public memory – for one thing, we might like to rethink our reliance on the mobile snap-and-upload mode of image sharing.

Continue reading “Image sharing in the #qldfloods”

Beauty, Fashion & Style Blog Analysis PART 2 (Qualitative)

This is my final post as a VRES student, and part 2 of my analysis of eight Australian Beauty, Fashion and Style blogs – see Part 1 (Quantitative) here. In this post, I look at some qualitative aspects of the blogs by answering the following questions:

Identity – Is the blogger an insider (journalist, stylist, fashion designer), outsider (individual) or aspiring insider (wannabe designer/stylist)?
Writing Style – Do the bloggers use similar language and writing styles? How does each blogger position him- or herself as an author (personable vs business orientated)?
Visual Style – Are there any similarities or differences in the aesthetics of each blog (cluttered vs minimal)?

As a refresher, the 8 blogs I have chosen to explore are:
1. Madame B Fatale
2. Lady Melbourne
3. Mylookbook
4. Missy Em – Frugalicious Fashion and Beauty
5. Friend in Fashion
6. In City Fashion
7. 2threads
8. Dustjacket Attic

Continue reading “Beauty, Fashion & Style Blog Analysis PART 2 (Qualitative)”

Twitter Spoils the Oscars Party for Channel Nine

As something of a distraction from our recent focus on the role of social media during natural disasters, I thought I’d share a few observations on the use of Twitter during the Oscars broadcast a few days ago. In addition to their massive global TV audience, the 2011 Academy Awards also featured the #Oscars hashtag for the first time, of course, encouraging even more discussion of the Oscar ceremony on Twitter.

And discuss they did – globally, over 500,000 tweets were posted during the marathon five-hour live event of the red carpet arrivals and awards ceremony, peaking at nearly 2500 tweets per minute during the tongue-in-cheek ‘best movie’ song montage:

Continue reading “Twitter Spoils the Oscars Party for Channel Nine”

Extracting images from Twapperkeeper archives

This is just a quick post to share another new script – this one takes a list of tweets with pre-resolved URLs, and filters the list for known image-hosting services. I whipped this up as part of our ongoing efforts to go deeper into the dynamics of communication at various phases of the Queensland Floods disaster – prompted in part by the observations I made on the link data, which showed a very high prevalence of user-uploaded images being posted and retweeted. Besides that, our project aims to investigate not only text-based public communication, but also the role of image- and video-sharing (as well as the communities that have emerged around these practices, particularly on the Flickr and YouTube platforms). I’m partway through drafting a substantial post taking a closer look at the role of image sharing (and communication around images) in both Twitter and Flickr during the floods, but for now here is the script and the instructions.

Please note that this script won’t work unless the urlextract.awk and urlresolve.awk scripts have been run on the archive first.


# extractimages.awk - extract tweets containing links to images
#
# this script takes a preprocessed CSV of tweets based on the Twapperkeeper format, looks at the longurl field, and removes any lines that do not contain a link to a known image hosting service
# the urlextract.awk and urlresolve.awk scripts should be run prior to running this script
# expected data format:
# longurl,url,text,[other columns]
#
# Released under Creative Commons (BY, NC, SA) by Jean Burgess - je.burgess@qut.edu.au and Axel Bruns - a.bruns@qut.edu.au
#Project website http://mappingonlinepublics.net

BEGIN { 
	getline 
	print $0
}

#add more services below as you find them
$1 ~ /(twitpic\.com|flickr\.com|yfrog\.com|plixi\.com|instagr\.am|photobucket\.com|occip\.it|picasaweb\.google|sphotos\.ak\.fbcdn\.net|facebook\.com\/photo|imgur\.com)/ {

print $0 

}

Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards: Call for Expressions of Interest (Updated)

On behalf of our colleagues in media, communication, cultural and journalism studies at QUT, I’m passing on an announcement about a new Australian fellowship scheme aimed at Early Career Researchers (0-5 years from PhD).

On a personal note, given the focus of our own work and the significant growth in activity around internet, digital media and games studies at QUT in recent years, Axel and I would be particularly keen to see a large number of high quality applications from people working in these areas; and especially those with a demonstrated interest in methodological innovation. Feel free to contact either of us directly for an informal chat or to ask questions about the research and work environment here; however more formal expressions of interest should go to the email addresses listed below. And one other thing to note: the official ARC rules for the scheme haven’t yet been released, but as far as we know so far, it is possible that these fellowships will be open to both Australian and international researchers.

Update: the rules have now been released and are available here – see the bottom of the post for further details on the application process.

In 2011, the Australian Research Council is introducing a new funding scheme for early career researchers, the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA), for funding commencing in 2012. We hereby call for expressions of interest from eligible researchers wishing to conduct their DECRA research at QUT in the communication, media, cultural studies and journalism disciplines.

We are the leading media research institution in Australia, having been awarded a ranking of 5 out of 5 (well above world standard) in the Language, Communication and Culture code overall, including a ranking of 5 in the sub-field Communications and Media Studies (one of only two), and a 4 (above world standard) in the Cultural Studies field, in the recent ERA assessment conducted by the Australian Government.

QUT is the headquarters of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), the only nationally-funded centre in the media and communication field, with strong ties to law, economics, business, and education, thus allowing for multiple cross-disciplinary options for research. Successful DECRA applicants will benefit from the vibrant scholarly environment at QUT, and work closely with world leaders in media, communication, cultural and journalism studies.

Further information on how to apply:

The ARC DECRA Funding Rules for awards commencing in 2012 state that non-Australians are eligible, but would be required to be legally resident in Australia from 2012 until the end of the award period.

If you would like to be considered for submission to the DECRA scheme by the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology please send a full CV and project outline to Professor Brian McNair at b.mcnair@qut.edu.au by Friday March 11.

Your CV should include:

A list of recent significant publications (2006 onwards), split into the four categories of:
o Scholarly books
o Scholarly book chapters
o Refereed journal articles
o Refereed conference papers

Number publications continuously and asterisk the publications relevant to this proposal.

Your Project Description – attach the following information in up to 10 pages:

o Project Title
o Summary (100 words)
o Aims and Background
o Significance and Innovation
o Approach and Methodology
o Benefit
o Communication of Results
o References

Twitter Events in Perspective (updated)

Regular readers of this blog will know that we’ve now examined Twitter activity around a number of recent events in some detail – from the Labor leadership spill in Australian politics in June 2010 through to the subsequent election, to the recent floods in Queensland and beyond. On that basis, we now also in a position to make some comparisons between these events: in the first place, to examine how they unfolded, and how much of the wider Twitter userbase they’ve been able to mobilise.

So, building on the work we’ve already done, and adding a few more case studies into the mix, here’s an overview of activity within selected Twitter #hashtags – in each case, over the course of their most active day. The process is similar in each case: retrieve a full #hashtag archive from Twapperkeeper, run our explodetime.awk Gawk script over the data to identify daily and hourly activity, then pick the 24 hours during which the volume of tweets in the #hashtag was most significant.

Continue reading “Twitter Events in Perspective (updated)”