Abstract
The widespread adoption of leading social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in much of the developed world has also led to a rise in research projects across the humanities and social sciences that seek to investigate and analyse the emerging uses of these platforms. A substantial number of such research projects have applied existing communication and cultural research methodologies to this task, including qualitative approaches (for example, the close reading of textual and communicative artefacts sourced from these platforms, or the ethnographic study of specific users and user communities) and quantitative methods (such as surveys of users to examine their attitudes and activities, in order to explore larger behavioural patterns).
Keywords
- Social Network Site
- Twitter User
- Social Media Platform
- Medium Method
- Twitter Account
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Works cited
Berry, David. (2011). ‘The Computational Turn: Thinking About the Digital Humanities’. Culture Machine 12. Available at: http://www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/article/view/440/470.
Berry, David, ed. (2012). Understanding Digital Humanities. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
boyd, danah. (2010). ‘Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications’. In Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, ed. Zizi Papacharissi, 39–58. New York: Routledge.
boyd, danah, Scott Golder, and Gilad Lotan. (2010). ‘Tweet, Tweet, Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on Twitter’. Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-43), 5–8 January 2010, Kauai, Hawaii. Available at: http://www.danah.org/papers/TweetTweetRetweet.pdf.
Bruns, Axel, and Hallvard Moe. (2014). ‘Structural Layers of Communication on Twitter’. In Twitter and Society, eds. Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, Cornelius Puschmann, 15–28. New York: Peter Lang.
Bruns, Axel, and Jean Burgess. (2011). ‘#ausvotes: How Twitter Covered the 2010 Australian Federal Election’. Communication, Politics, and Culture 44, no. 2: 37–56.
Bruns, Axel, and Stefan Stieglitz. (2012). ‘Quantitative Approaches to Comparing Communication Patterns on Twitter’. Journal of Technology in Human Services 30, nos. 3–4 (July): 160–85.
Bruns, Axel, and Stefan Stieglitz. (2013). ‘Towards More Systematic Twitter Analysis: Metrics for Tweeting Activities’. International Journal of Social Research Methodology, 22 January. DOI: 10.1080/13645579.2012.756095.
Bruns, Axel, Jean Burgess, Kate Crawford, and Frances Shaw. (2012). #qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods. Brisbane: ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation. Available at: http://cci.edu.au/floodsreport.pdf.
Bull, Tim. (2010). ‘How Many Australian Twitter Users Are There, and Where Are They From?’ Tribalytic blog, 13 May. Available at: http://blog.tribalytic.com/how-many-australian-twitter — users-are-there-and-where-are-they-from/.
Burgess, Jean, and Axel Bruns. (2012a). ‘(Not) the Twitter Election: The Dynamics of the #ausvotes Conversation in Relation to the Australian Media Ecology’. Journalism Practice 6, no. 3: 384–402. DOI:10.1080/17512786.2012.663610.
Burgess, Jean, and Axel Bruns. (2012b). ‘Twitter Archives and the Challenges of “Big Social Data” for Media and Communication Research’. M/C Journal 15, no. 5. Available at: http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/561.
Burns, Alex, and Ben Eltham. (2009). ‘Twitter Free Iran: An Evaluation of Twitter’s Role in Public Diplomacy and Information Operations in Iran’s 2009 Election Crisis’. Record of the Communications Policy and Research Forum 2009, Sydney, 298–310.
Christensen, Christian. (2011). ‘Twitter Revolutions? Addressing Social Media and Dissent’. Communication Review 14, no. 3: 155–57.
Coleman, Stephen. (2006). ‘How the Other Half Votes: Big Brother Viewers and the 2005 General Election’. International Journal of Cultural Studies 9, no. 4: 457–79. DOI:10.1177/1367877906069895.
Deller, Ruth. (2011). ‘Twittering On: Audience Research and Participation Using Twitter’. Participations 8, no. 1. Available at: http://www.participations.org/Volume%208/Issue%201/deller.htm.
Dröge, Evelyn, Parinaz Maghferat, Cornelius Puschmann, Julia Verbina, and Katrin Weller. (2011). ‘Konferenz-Tweets: Ein Ansatz zur Analyse der Twitter-Kommunikation bei wissenschaftlichen Konferenzen’. Proceedings of the 12th International Symposium for Information Science, 9–11 March 2011, Hildesheim. Verlag Werner Hülsbusch. Available at: http://ynada.com/pubs/isi2010.pdf.
Gephi.org. (2012). ‘Gephi, an Open Source Graph Visualization and Manipulation Software’. Available at: http://gephi.org/.
Gillespie, Tarleton. (2014). ‘The Relevance of Algorithms’. In Media Technologies, ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo Boczkowski, and Kirsten Foot. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Harrington, Stephen, Tim Highfield, and Axel Bruns. (2012). ‘More Than a Backchannel: Twitter and Television’. In Audience Interactivity and Participation, ed. José Manuel Noguera, 13–17. Brussels: COST Action Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies. Available at: http://www.cost-transforming-audiences.eu/system/files/essays-and-interview-essays-18-06-12.pdf.
Hartley, John. (2009). ‘From Cultural Studies to Cultural Science’. Cultural Science 2, no. 1. Available at: http://www.cultural-science.org/journal/index.php/culturalscience/article/viewArticle/19/68.
Highfield, Tim, Stephen Harrington, and Axel Bruns. (2013). ‘Twitter as a Technology for Audiencing and Fandom: The #Eurovision Phenomenon’. Information, Communication, and Society, 3 January. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2012.756053.
Jacomy, Mathieu, Sebastien Heymann, Tommaso Venturini, and Mathieu Bastian. (2011). ‘ForceAtlas2: A Graph Layout Algorithm for Handy Network Visualization’. Discussion paper, Paris, 29 August. Available at: http://webatlas.fr/tempshare/ForceAtlas2_Paper.pdf.
Larsson, Anders Olof, and Hallvard Moe. (2011). ‘Studying Political Microblogging: Twitter Users in the 2010 Swedish Election Campaign’. New Media and Society 14, no. 5: 729–47.
Lotan, Gilad, Erhardt Graeff, Mike Ananny, Devin Gaffney, Ian Pearce, and danah boyd. (2011). ‘The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions’. International Journal of Communication 5: 1375–405.
Manovich, Lev. (2012). ‘Trending: The Promises and the Challenges of Big Social Data’. In Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold, 460–75. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Marwick, Alice. E., and danah boyd. (2011). ‘I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience’. New Media and Society 13, no. 1: 114–33.
Mendoza, Marcelo, Barbara Poblete, and Carlos Castillo. (2010). ‘Twitter Under Crisis: Can We Trust What We RT?’ First Workshop on Social Media Analytics (SOMA’ 10), Washington, D.C.
Palen, Leysia, Kate Starbird, Sarah Vieweg, and Anabda Hughes. (2010). ‘Twitter-Based Information Distribution During the 2009 Red River Valley Flood Threat’. Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 36, no. 5: 13–17.
Papacharissi, Zizi A. (2010). A Private Sphere: Democracy in a Digital Age. Cambridge: Polity.
Papacharissi, Zizi A. (2011). ‘Conclusion: A Networked Self’. In A Networked Self: Identity, Community and Culture on Social Network Sites, ed. Zizi Papacharissi, 304–18. New York: Routledge.
Puschmann, Cornelius, and Jean Burgess. (2013). ‘The Politics of Twitter Data’. HIIG Discussion Paper Series 2013–01. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2206225.
Schmidt, Jan-Hinrik. (2011). Das neue Netz: Merkmale, Praktiken und Folgen des Web 2.0. 2nd ed. Konstanz: UVK.
Stieglitz, Stefan, and Linh Dang-Xuan. (2013). ‘Social Media and Political Communication: A Social Media Analytics Framework’. In Social Network Analysis and Mining 3, no. 4: 1–15. DOI: 10.1007/s13278-012-0079-3.
Twitter. (2012a). ‘Olympic (and Twitter) Records’. Twitter Blog, 12 August. Available at: http://blog.twitter.com/2012/08/olympic-and-twitter-records.html.
Twitter. (2012b). ‘GET Users/lookup’. Twitter Developers. Available at: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/api/1.1/get/users/lookup.
Weller, Katrin, Evelyn Dröge, and Cornelius Puschmann. (2011). ‘Citation Analysis in Twitter: Approaches for Defining and Measuring Information Flows Within Tweets During Scientific Conferences’. First Workshop on Making Sense of Microposts, #MSM2011, Heraklion, 30 May 2011. Available at: http://files.ynada.com/papers/msm2011.pdf.
Wilken, Rowan. (2013). ‘Twitter and Geographical Location’. In Twitter and Society, eds. Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, Cornelius Puschmann, 155–68. New York: Peter Lang.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess and Tim Highfield
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Bruns, A., Burgess, J., Highfield, T. (2014). A ‘Big Data’ Approach to Mapping the Australian Twittersphere. In: Arthur, P.L., Bode, K. (eds) Advancing Digital Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137337016_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137337016_8
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-33700-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-33701-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave Media & Culture CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)