For anyone based in Australia – and especially for those of us here in Queensland – the major domestic news story of March 2017 is no doubt the impact of Tropical Cyclone Debbie on the coastal communities of the central coast Queensland. It is not entirely surprising, however, that the cyclone fails to impact strongly …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, March 2017”
It feels as if February 2017 has been a month of permanent crisis. Between the exceptionally controversial first steps of the fledgling Trump administration in the United States, the increasingly fragile relationships between the various factions within the Coalition government, and the renewed hostilities between government and opposition on the resumption of federal parliament, hardly …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, February 2017”
The Australian Twitter News Index has been on hold for the past few months as we’ve adjusted our data gathering approach to address some changes to Twitter’s data gathering frameworks, and unfortunately this period has also included the U.S. election and its immediate aftermath. But we’re back in time to the inauguration of President Trump, …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, January 2017”
As the world turns its attention to the slow-motion car crash that is this year’s U.S. presidential election, September in Australia was a comparatively ordinary, intermediate month for news. A number of continuing scandals and controversies – including the donations affair engulfing Labor Senator Sam Dastyari, the Country Fire Authority pay dispute in Victoria, and …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, September 2016”
As the 2016 federal election campaign recedes into memory, online engagement with the news in Australia has returned to what passes for normality these days. This is also reflected in the news sharing activities we are able to observe in the Australian Twitter News Index for August: the long-term patterns of how Twitter users’ attention …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, August 2016”
This instalment of the Australian Twitter News Index covers the business end of the Australian federal election campaign, which culminated in election day on 2 July 2016 and was followed by a brief period of uncertainty over whether the Coalition government had in fact held on to enough seats in the House of Representatives to …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, June-July 2016”
As we conclude this very lengthy Australian election campaign, let us review how the candidates fared on Twitter these past two weeks. Our research tracks all tweets directed at or posted by the candidates’ Twitter accounts. This provides a more comprehensive picture than the comparatively more self-selecting election- and politics-related hashtags #ausvotes and #auspol. The …
Continue reading “#ausvotes: A Final Update from the Social Media Hustings”
We’re now well into the federal election season, and of course this is reflected in the Twitter-based news sharing activities captured in the Australian Twitter News Index as well. But – because as in previous elections the general public tends to fully connect with the campaign only in the final weeks before election day – …
Continue reading “ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, May 2016”
The QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) has been running various digital methods training workshops internally as well as externally through the CCI Digital Methods Summer School and the Association of Internet Researchers Conference last year in Phoenix and coming up again this year in Berlin as part of #AoIR2016. As an extension to these …
Continue reading “Extension exercises: analysing #climatechange using Tableau and Gephi”
We’re now well into one of the longest Australian election campaigns in recent memory, and close enough to election date that we should expect the general public and not just the usual political junkies to begin engaging with the parties’ campaigns. Time, then, to examine how the parties are faring on social media to date. …
