Top 20 election-related YouTube videos (according to Twitter)

Update: this analysis covers a few less days than I originally stated – the results should look quite different once we add in this week’s links (and next week’s!). Here are the top 20 Australian election-related YouTube videos so far up to last Friday morning, according to the Twitterati. Or to be more precise, here …

Using Gawk and Wget to Resolve URL Shorteners

Jean’s post today points to a key problem in examining user activities on Twitter and elsewhere – people are increasingly using bit.ly and other URL shorteners, which means that a) the same target URL might appear in any number of different shortened versions, and b) it’s no longer possible from a quick look at a …

Visualising topic-based conversation networks: the #masterchef edition

In future analysis we’ll be interested in doing some form of comparison between the #ausvotes data we’ve been looking at (and that Axel has already blogged about earlier this week), and other topics of shared interest among Australian Twitter users. As an exceptionally high-rating Australian prime-time TV show that was also a trending topic on Twitter, Masterchef is a particularly interesting example of such a topic drawn from popular culture. The patterns of Twitter use around this highly popular, nationally-based show (perhaps even more so than around the pre-election debate) can hopefully help us to understand something about the practices of the networked television audience as a public.

Creating Twitter Timelines from Twapperkeeper Data

This is the first in what will be an irregular series of methods posts outlining some of our approaches to working with datasets from various sources. Part of our work over the next few weeks will be to examine what happens in the Australian Twittersphere around the upcoming federal election, so I figured it would …