Beauty, Fashion & Style Blog Analysis PART 1 (Quantitative)

As noted in my first post about blog categorisation, I have now assessed 8 Beauty, Fashion and Style blogs to determine whether any similarities exist in terms of subscribers, style, and content. This post is part 1 of 2 and will cover all quantitative aspects by answering the following questions:

Popularity – How many subscribers?
Frequency – Does the blogger write daily, weekly, fortnightly or monthly?
Duration – How long has the blog been active?
Originality – Is content original or similar to that of other fashion and beauty resources?

Part 2 of my analysis will look into the qualitative aspects, such as the bloggers identity (professional vs amateur) and the textual and visual styles of the blogs. Continue reading “Beauty, Fashion & Style Blog Analysis PART 1 (Quantitative)”

Australian Blogosphere – Categorisation Process

Over the past few weeks, as part of the VRES program at QUT, I have been assisting Axel and Jean on their Social Media Mapping project.    The aim of the project is to try to understand the shape and dynamics of online public communication in Australia – focusing on “user created content” such as Blogs, Twitter, Youtube, and Flickr.  My particular role in the program is to assess and categorise the online communication in the Australian Blogosphere.  In doing this, I have begun analysing a list of over 7000 active Australian Blogs and allocating them into categories accordingly.  By the end of this exercise, we will be able to view the category trends in Australian blogging and use this as a comparison against other countries later down the track.

Currently, a few weeks into the program, I have categorised just over 2000 blogs.  However, I think it is important to note how I got to this stage as well as the established categories for feedback purposes.  When first approaching this project, Jean and I worked together through a selection of 100 blogs and established some preliminary categories.  In doing this exercise we came up with 17 categories, planned to be further worked into a succinct and exhaustive list within the coming weeks.  This original list can give you more info and it as follows: Continue reading “Australian Blogosphere – Categorisation Process”

Media use in the #qldfloods

As I’m sure you’re aware, last week was pretty rough for Queensland (and then New South Wales and Victoria), as devastating flash floods ripped through Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley, quickly followed by extreme river flooding in Ipswich and Brisbane that saw thousands of homes inundated. As in any emergency situation or other ‘acute event’, public communication played a vital role during all phases of the flooding – from warning, to emergency, and – eventually – to recovery, relief and rebuilding.

In this and the related Media Ecologies project in the CCI, we’re trying to understand how public communication is constituted through the operation of the broader media ecology, including social media as well as the full range of other communication technologies and practices that individual citizens have at their disposal. So we’re throwing all the research tools we have in our kit (and developing some new ones) at analysing public communication during the floods – initially through the lens of social media, and particularly, Twitter.

Axel has already posted a first look at some overall patterns of Twitter activity during the most acute period of the event, and at the end of the post asked our readers to nominate research questions and ideas for us to investigate – thanks very much to those who’ve contributed ideas so far. There is much more to do of course, and we’re on the case. In this and subsequent posts, I’m focusing on some patterns in the uses made of various media platforms and sources by Twitter users during the flood.

Continue reading “Media use in the #qldfloods”

Twitter’s Reaction to #twitdef – Part 2

Now that the dust has (mostly) settled on the #twitdef controversy of late last year, I’m continuing my summer research project, and looking deeper into the reaction to Australia’s first twitter defamation case. We already know who the main actors are (see my first post for more info) in the debate; it’s now time to have a look at exactly what they were saying.

It’s worth mentioning why I’ve taken a continued interest in this topic. After the results of my first post showed that much of the traffic coming out of the hashtag was from what could be classified as ‘regular citizens’, it begged the question: Is the twitdef hashtag a true platform for the debate surrounding free speech and journalism in Australia, or is it just a sounding board to take pot-shots at Australia’s mainstream media outlets?

Continue reading “Twitter’s Reaction to #twitdef – Part 2”

The Queensland Floods on Twitter: A Brief First Look

Update: added another graph showing the total number of tweets from leading accounts.

Queensland has just experienced a once-in-decades flood event, with the capital Brisbane (where we’re based) hit especially hard. Social media like Twitter and Facebook played an important role in getting information out and organising rescue, relief, and recovery operations.

We’ll have a much closer look at the role of these platforms during the height of the crisis at a later stage, when we find the time – for now, I wanted to post a quick overview of the level of Twitter activity at least. This graph shows tweets using the #qldflood(s) hashtags between 11 and 14 January 2011 (retrieved via Twapperkeeper):

Continue reading “The Queensland Floods on Twitter: A Brief First Look”

Visualising Twitter Dynamics in Gephi, Part 2

OK, so this is the second part of my post on turning Twitter data from Twapperkeeper into a dynamic network visualisation in Gephi. Last night’s post did the groundwork, generating a GEXF file from our #spill hashtag dataset (covering Twitter discussion of an Australian Labor Party leadership spill between 7 p.m. and midnight (AEST) on 23 June 2010). In this post, we’ll work with this data file to generate a number of dynamic visualisations of the @reply activity (including old-style ‘RT @username’ retweets) during this time.

Essentially, here’s the overall network of the most active participants which we ended up with last night, now with each node’s degree value (number of @replies sent + number of @replies received, from within this most active group) next to its name. (If positions of nodes have shifted slightly from what they were, that’s because I had to recalculate the map again.) As noted at the end of part one, this overall map somewhat underestimates the weight of connections within the network, due to a limitation in how Gephi currently calculates its edge weight averages, but hopefully this will be fixed soon. What I’ve done in this new version of the map, though, is to highlight a number of interesting nodes in the network whom we’ll want to follow further:

Continue reading “Visualising Twitter Dynamics in Gephi, Part 2”

Visualising Twitter Dynamics in Gephi, Part 1

In the following posts I’m finally keeping my promise to explore in earnest the use of Gephi‘s dynamic timeline feature for visualising Twitter-based discussions as they unfolded in real time. A few months ago, Jean posted a first glimpse of our then still very experimental data on Twitter dynamics, with a string of caveats attached – and I followed up on this a little while later with some background on the Gawk scripts we’re using to generate timeline data in GEXF format from our trusty Twapperkeeper archives (note that I’ve updated one of the scripts in that post, to make the process case-insensitive). Building on those posts, here I’ll outline the entire process and show some practical results (disclaimer: actual dynamic animations will follow in part two, tomorrow – first we’re focussing on laying the groundwork).

First, a quick overview: what we’re after is a process that provides us not only with a static map of all connections (i.e., @replies – including old-style ‘RT @user’ retweets) made between a specific group of users on Twitter during a given period of time, but a dynamic visualisation of how those connections unfolded over the course of that period: how specific users assume more or less central positions in the @reply network as time unfolds; how discussion activity waxes and wanes; how particular tweets stimulate further activity in the network (for example as users reply to them or retweet them).

Continue reading “Visualising Twitter Dynamics in Gephi, Part 1”

Twitter’s Reaction to #twitdef

Hello! Will Dawson here. Axel and Jean have been kind enough to take on a VRES student over summer (think of it like the work-experience kid of the academic world). Basically, VRES (or Vacation Research Experience Scholarship) is a QUT scheme that allows undergrads to get a taste of research, before moving on to higher research study. I’m a pretty avid Twitter user myself (we’ll get the shameless self promotion out of the way – my username is @willdawson90), and I’ve been permitted to run wild and take on my own mini-research project that I’ll be looking at over the next couple of weeks.

Amongst tweets about the cricket and Wikileaks, I’ve taken great interest to one of the more intriguing hashtags to come out of Twitter recently – the #twitdef debate. For those on Twitter it’s been hard to miss, but for anyone unaware of the saga, the hashtag has surrounded Australia’s first (potential) defamation case on twitter.

Continue reading “Twitter’s Reaction to #twitdef”

Election 2010: The View from Twitter

One more time for the world: there will be a final (I think) presentation for this year of our work around Twitter in the 2010 Australian election, at the International Australian Studies Association ‘Double Vision’ conference in Sydney on Friday. This is something of a ‘best of’ of the material which we’ve already presented here on the blog over the past few months, though I wouldn’t be surprised if we do a little more data-crunching on this corpus again in the future. I’m already posting the slides and abstract below – audio to come later, if all works out with audio now also added.

Election 2010: The View from Twitter

View more presentations from Axel Bruns.

Though it may not have had a substantial effect on the eventual outcome, Twitter was a highly visible component of the 2010 Australian election coverage. During the campaign, the #ausvotes hashtag alone generated over 400,000 tweets. This paper provides an overview of key trends in Twitter-based discussion of the Australian election.

Some Updates on Recent Developments

Activity on this blog has slowed down a little since Jean and I have come back to Australia from our European adventures, as we work through a backlog of other more or less urgent tasks – but while we wait to get back to some hands-on work on the Mapping Online Publics project, I thought I’d provide a few updates on our past and upcoming activities:

Social Science Computer Review

Our special issue of Social Science Computer Review, edited with Carol Soon and Han Woo Park, has now been published at least in its online version (with print to follow). Articles in the special issue are available on the journal site, and in particular the collection includes our “Mapping the Australian Networked Public Sphere” (with Tim Highfield, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai), as well as “Challenges of Tracking Topical Discussion Networks Online” (by Tim Highfield, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai) and “Mapping the Norwegian Blogosphere: Methodological Challenges in Internationalizing Internet Research” (by Hallvard Moe), both of which are also immediately relevant to our work. All eight articles in the issue were drawn from two panels we organised for the International Communication Association conference in Singapore, in June.

Continue reading “Some Updates on Recent Developments”