{"id":883,"date":"2011-08-12T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-08-11T23:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/2011\/08\/12\/twitter-and-the-royal-wedding-pt-1-something-processed\/"},"modified":"2012-04-23T15:25:39","modified_gmt":"2012-04-23T05:25:39","slug":"twitter-and-the-royal-wedding-pt-1-something-processed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mappingonlinepublics.net\/dev\/2011\/08\/12\/twitter-and-the-royal-wedding-pt-1-something-processed\/","title":{"rendered":"Twitter and the Royal Wedding, Pt. 1: Something Processed"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK: I realise this may induce some cognitive dissonance in susceptible readers while those images of the London riots continue to flash across our TV screens (and we’re now also tracking some of the Twitter<\/em> coverage of the riots and subsequent cleanup – more on that some other time, if anything interesting emerges). For some time, though, I’ve been meaning to post up some observations about that rather more glamorous event in recent British history: the royal wedding between Kate Middleton and Prince William on 29 April 2011.<\/p>\n

We’re planning to explore this in detail in a paper some time down the track, so the main purpose of this blog post is to try on some approaches to analysing the event, and to test out some new approaches to crunching the data that I’ve played with recently – some of these ideas, in fact, resulted from our intensive research workshops with our visitors from the Universit\u00e4t D\u00fcsseldorf, Katrin Weller and Cornelius Puschmann<\/a>, so they’re also a first outcome of that ATN-DAAD project.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

What we’ll look at here are tweets containing the #royalwedding hashtag on the day of the wedding itself, from 00:00 to 23:59 GMT. We captured a total of 943927 tweets that day (which includes a 20-minute outage after 22:00 – so there’d be a few more still); of these, 241560 were manual retweets, 98347 were @replies, and 121386 contained URLs. Here’s the usual minute-by-minute overview of the entire 24-hour period:<\/p>\n

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What’s immediately obvious, of course, is the notable ramping-up of tweets at exactly 7:00 GMT, and further steep increases at 8:00 and 8:15 – clear signs not simply of actual activity in London, but of the nature of the wedding as a global televised event: these were the times when various networks around the world were starting their live coverage of the royal wedding.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the next four or five hours, Twitter<\/em> activity in the #royalwedding hashtag remains at a high level (of around 2000 tweets per minute: over 30 tweets per second), with a number of notable spikes along the way. I haven’t gone back through the tweets themselves in much detail, but it’s clear from the official timetable of the event that they correspond very clearly with a number of major moments: the arrivals of Princes William and Harry, the Queen and Prince Philip, Charles and Camilla, and of course the bride and her attendants.<\/p>\n

After some drop-off before 12:00 GMT, though, the most significant spike of the day occurs between about 12:24 and 12:33 – and you don’t need to be a close follower of the royal family to guess that this marks the newlyweds’ first kisses on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, of course. Here, we can also observe most clearly a phenomenon which we’ve already seen in a number of entirely different circumstances: not only is the jump in overall tweets quite substantial (probably some 1000 tweets per minute above the #royalwedding baseline levels immediately before and after this moment), but it coincides exactly with an equally significant drop in retweets, @replies, and shared URLs, too.<\/p>\n

In other words, not only do we have vastly more tweets in total at that point, but a far greater percentage of those tweets are original<\/em> tweets – neither responding to others, nor passing along existing messages, not sharing external URLs. It’s as if the vast majority of the #royalwedding community present at that point let out a communal ‘Awww…’ at the same moment.<\/p>\n

And again, this is not an entirely new observation for us. We’ve seen something similar in a very different context, and on a different temporal scale: during the Australian election campaign of 2010, we noted a marked increase in the number of tweets, and a corresponding decrease in the percentage of @replies and retweets, on the day of the televised leaders’ debate between Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott. My interpretation of what’s happening here, then, is that during such key moments in an unfolding event, when everybody’s watching, most Twitter<\/em> users feel compelled to articulate their own responses in a tweet, but (for the moment) take their eyes off what their peers are tweeting. That’s not to say that they’re only paying attention to the TV for that one moment; clearly, that’s not true: the patterns in our data demonstrate it. However, during this moment – a few minutes on the royal wedding day, a few hours in a five-week election campaign – attention is especially heightened, expressing one’s own views is the primary instinct, and responding, retweeting, or sharing other information becomes something that can be dealt with later. That idea of a communal ‘Awww…’ (or, depending on your view, ‘Ewww…’) actually mightn’t be too far off the mark.<\/p>\n

There’s more to explore here at a later stage – I’m curious about the two spikes in overall tweets during the 14:00-15:00 period, for example, only one<\/em> of which is matched by a corresponding spike in the number of retweets – but let’s move on to look at the data in a different way. Similar to what we’ve done in our post on the Go Back to Where You Came From<\/em> SBS television series, I’ve also graphed mentions of the key dramatis personae<\/em> of the royal wedding (full PNG here – 15 MB<\/a>):
\nHere, I’ve counted tweets mentioning the names of the various royals and other key actors – the Archbishop of Canterbury, David Cameron, and the Middleton siblings – in a number of different variations (Philippa\/Pippa, Catherine\/Kate, etc.), and plotted Twitter<\/em> users according to which names they use how often; except for the royals themselves, node sizes and colours indicate how often individual users mentioned any of the 15 principals. Zoom in closely – there really are a lot<\/em> of Twitter<\/em> users shown here: over 160,000 in total.<\/p>\n

In addition to showing how much any of the individuals are being mentioned (the sizes of the various halos of Twitter<\/em> users around the royals provide a good indication), this also pulls the royals into the groups of Twitter<\/em> users who mention them most often – and thus points to the relative affinity of the individual actors in the tweet stream. It’s no surprise that Kate and William are both mentioned a great deal, and are also mentioned a lot together (though there are also a good number of separate mentions, of course), and – especially given his key role in the ceremony – that Harry is the next most visible royal; similarly, Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice are both relative outsiders to the royal family, and (as sisters appearing together, and with similarly questionable fashion choices on the day) mentioned frequently by the same small group of Twitter<\/em> users.<\/p>\n

Their mother, Sarah Ferguson, however, appears much closer to the centre, in the immediate vicinity of the Queen and Prince Philip; undoubtedly, this is closely related to Twitter<\/em> users discussing the fact that the Queen barred her former daughter-in-law to the wedding. Elsewhere, Charles, Camilla, and Diana continue to form a somewhat uneasy triad, and it is Diana, more so than Charles, who is mentioned alongside the new royal couple. The Archbishop, the Prime Minister, and Kate’s brother James Middleton remain minor characters in the ceremony, meanwhile, and this goes even for Pippa Middleton, who in spite of her role as maid of honour commands only limited attention (her vicinity to Prince Harry is not accidental, however, as a few tweets speculated about the potential of another Windsor\/Middleton pair…).<\/p>\n

So much for a relatively basic overview, then. In the second part of this post<\/a>, I’ll try something a little different: we’ll examine what the other<\/em> hashtags used alongside #royalwedding are able to tell us about how Twitter<\/em> saw the event.<\/p>\n

Feature image by\u00a0Beacon Radio<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK: I realise this may induce some cognitive dissonance in susceptible readers while those images of the London riots continue to flash across our TV screens (and we’re now also tracking some of the Twitter coverage of the riots and subsequent cleanup – more on that some other time, if anything interesting emerges). For some … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Twitter and the Royal Wedding, Pt. 1: Something Processed”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

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