Researching the Twitterverse

  

Are you a tweeter? Are you constantly monitoring how many followers you have? Do you find yourself chortling over the latest hashtag meme, glued to your screen while people around you wonder what on earth’s going on? Maybe you’ve got multiple identities - tweeting to buddies with your private @name while your professional alter ego behaves itself under another? Or have you got no idea what we’re talking about?

It’s hard to believe this social media phenomenon only started in July 2006. It certainly seems people are jumping on to Twitter exponentially, especially if they watch Q&A. It’s leaving corporations, governments and organisations clambering for strategies and policies they can implement to keep up with this anarchic juggernaut and scratching their heads about how to be translate corporate ‘speak’ into a social ‘conversation’.

But we don’t even know how many people are really using it?

At a conference this week in Brisbane two researchers from the QUT’s Creative Industries Faculty, Assoc. Prof. Axel Bruns and Dr. Jean Burgess, have been leading a workshop on Twitter research - Making Sense of Twitter: Quantitative Analysis Using Twapperkeeper and Other Tools. They were talking about Gawk and Gephi too.

Quantitative and qualitative methodological geek stuff? Maybe. But certainly not something to be dismissed. What these academic researchers are trying to come to grips with as they study the mountains of data Twitter throws up can have very real and significant applications.

Bruns and Burgess have been studying how Twitter is used during natural disasters, particularly the January floods in Queensland, Christchurch earthquake and Japanese Tsunami. Their results are of particular interest to the Emergency Services, who want to better understand how to use social media and its crowd-sourcing capabilities, says Bruns. Authorities are looking for ways to disseminate vital information, interpret what can be provided from locals on the ground yet combat potential misinformation or information that has become out-dated but continues to circulate. You also have to be able to assess how effective your social media strategies have been.

A concrete example of this occurred during the Queensland floods when a call out to help evacuate the RSPCA shelter in Fairfield provided many volunteers yet also saw people trying to reach the shelter when conditions had become dangerous and after the shelter had been flooded.

Their research is also trying to estimate just how significant the Twitter community is. On election day last year there were 95,000 tweets that used the #ozvotes hashtag, Bruns says, and they found 36,000 individual users were participating. Is that a lot? Without knowing the size of the Australian twitter population it’s not possible to know whether that represents 1%, 5% or 20%. Discovering that sort of information will allow researchers to understand whether people on Twitter actually care about a particular topic or not.

Estimates of the number of Australian twitter users in various market research reports have ranged wildly, from 200,000 to 2.2 million users says Bruns. The QUT team are doing their own estimates and have so far identified 550,000 Australian twitter users. But the number is always growing, both as people join up and as they find them.

To further expand their research it was announced in June that the QUT team have received funding to collaborate with German partners at the universities of Düsseldorf and Münster, in two of only eleven projects to be funded by the Australian Technologies Network and German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) this year. With the Düsseldorf researchers, who are also in Brisbane this week, Bruns and Burgess will be comparing their methodologies and research tools. The Münster project will be focussed broadly on brand communication.

Bruns says it’s relatively easy for them to track mentions such as a particular artist or performance group. They can see to what extent people are talking about them, if at all; assess whether the mentions are positive or negative, even track spikes and whether they occur after a particular performance. Substitute that for a brand and the potential commercial desirability of these types of studies to major companies are obvious. Yes, what you say is being closely watched.

But for all this research Twitter itself is still evolving. With every new user there is the potential that new and previously unthought of ways of using the space will be invented, just as the @ sign and the hashtag were invented and adopted by users themselves.

It’s very much a moving target, admits Bruns but that’s part of the fascination, tracking user-led innovations, how communication patterns change over time and how information travels over the network. ‘Twitter can be used for so many different things. So, we’re actually trying to track the system itself and how it evolves through what users make of it.’

Gawk is a command line tool used to process tab or comma delimited files and extract and filter specific criteria within the data

Gephi is open source network visualisation software that provides a visual representation of a network helping to identify clusters, nodes and highlight key users.

To learn more about the 5th International Conference on Communities & Technologies – C&T 2011 go to ct2011.urbaninformatics.net/.

More information about the research conducted by the QUT team can be found at their project website mappingonlinepublics.net.
More information about the CCI is available at cci.edu.au.