Ordinarily, January is a relatively slow news month in Australia. That’s far from true for January 2015, however: first, the Queensland premier Campbell Newman surprised journalists, the opposition, and quite a few of his own colleagues by calling an almost unprecedentedly early state election. Then, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s “captain’s call” of awarding a knighthood …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, January 2015”
You might have been forgiven for thinking that the time between the Queensland state election in January and the New South Wales state election in March would be a little quiet, politically speaking – with the incumbent Queensland government on an overwhelming majority and the NSW government facing no serious challenge to date. As we …
Continue reading “#libspill: A Helpful Social Media Overview”
The final ATNIX for 2014 arrives with a slight delay due to the summer holidays, but covers an unexpectedly dramatic few weeks in Australian public life, due especially to the deadly siege in the Lindt Café in Sydney’s Martin Place in mid-December. This major breaking news story and its tragic aftermath are clearly reflected in …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, December 2014”
With the drama and excitements of the Melbourne Cup and G20 summit receding into memory, and the current trials and tribulations of the federal government taking centre-stage once again, it’s time to update our Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) for the month of November. Sadly, scheduled server maintenance has meant that we’ve missed out on …
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In my previous post, I introduced the revamped and rebooted Australian Twitter News Index, which now covers both link sharing patterns on Twitter for Australian news and opinion sites and general online popularity trends for those sites. Having covered the long-term trends since 2012 in that post, it’s now time for the first monthly update …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, September/October 2014”
It’s been a long time since I’ve published the Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) on a semi-regular basis – other commitments got the better of me for some time, I’m afraid. In addition, I’ve also needed to make a number of technical changes to make the index more manageable and sustainable, and I’ve outlined some …
Continue reading “From ATNIX to Hitwise: Australian Online News Audiences, 2012-14”
Twitter is widely used in Australia, but we don’t actually know such a great deal about the structure and dynamics of the Australian Twittersphere. Back in 2011/12, our research began to identify Australian Twitter users and map their follower/followee connections in order to develop a better understanding of the structure of the network and from …
Continue reading “First Steps in Exploring the Australian Twittersphere”
The images below present higher-resolution versions of the graphs contained in the chapter “A ‘Big Data’ Approach to Mapping the Australian Twittersphere” by Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, and Tim Highfield in the collection Repurposing the Digital Humanities, edited by Paul Arthur and Katherine Bode, which will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014. We are …
Continue reading “Digital Appendix: A ‘Big Data’ Approach to Mapping the Australian Twittersphere”
The 2013 Australian federal election campaign is (finally) over – and as the final vote counts in tightly contested seats conclude, the incoming Abbott government will presumably be sworn into office any week now, after a surprisingly low-key start to the post-election period. Time, then, to explore how the final week of the campaign unfolded …
Continue reading “#ausvotes: The Australian Federal Election on Twitter, Final Week”
For my last post about the Twitter activity around Australian politicians before tomorrow’s election, I’m once again looking at the distribution of Twitter activity across Australia’s 150 electorates (this is excluding Senate candidates by default, therefore). We’ve done this once before during this campaign, a few weeks back – this post covers the period from …
Continue reading “#ausvotes: Twitter Activity by Electorate”
