I’m still behind on all my RSS feeds after October, so rather than try and catch up, here’s something new(er). Over the weekend just gone, the Personal Democracy Forum – Europe (PDFEU/#pdfeu if you want to trawl the twitter archives) was held in Barcelona. Having only found out about it on Friday evening Brisbane time, as it was getting underway in Spain, I wasn’t attending the conference itself, but through the wonders of live streaming (run by Civico and containing audio, twitter, and CoverItLive live blogging), I was able to listen to the first few sessions on Friday. [The other sessions from Friday and Saturday are archived on the site at the moment if there's anything that looks interesting]

There were several interesting discussions and topics, some of which were unfortunately missed due to sleep needs or being break-out sessions not streamed live, although information on those might be available on the live streaming site now. However, the most immediately impressive presentation coming out of PDFEU (certainly given my research interests) was that by Anthony Hamelle and Clémence Lerondeau of linkfluence (leaders in social network mapping and mentioned here several times previously). In their presentation, they unveiled a new linkfluence project, moving beyond their previous studies of French/U.S. political blogs or (French language discussion of) European topics on the internet. Instead, the latest study (visualisation below) looks at the ‘Eurosphere’ – blogs and websites run by commentators, parties, think tanks, activists, journalists, and so on, from France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy (the analysis also features a Europe affairs-specific cluster, drawing from all four nations). For specific information, I’d recommend going through the presentation itself (with audio available from the PDFEU streaming site), and also the accompanying linkfluence blog post. There’s more information to come, obviously, but a few findings are already particularly interesting: first, the varying bridging/gatekeeping population found in the different national spheres (the French having the most bridging bloggers), and indeed the very presence and function of bridge bloggers (Ethan Zuckerman has written about this subject previously, although not for as specific a context as European (political) topics). The comparative lack of interaction between national spheres is also interesting (bridging happening more between the EU-specific cluster and the national spheres), language could possibly be a factor, although the greater tendency of a particular group (Euro-sceptics and anti-federalists) to engage in conversations across the boundaries of the national spheres makes this finding a particularly fascinating topic for future research (well, maybe)!

There will be more coming out of this project from linkfluence, as the final slide shows, but the teaser material unveiled at pdfeu – and the topical case study used in the presentation, looking at the EU Presidency as a discussion topic over the previous month – suggests that the scope of this study will provide some interesting information on discussions and interactions at an international level:

[Also, from a purely aesthetic perspective, how great (and clean) does the visualisation itself look?]

or, what I did on my travels, 5 October – 4 November 2009 (listed here mostly in case my memory fails):

Conference:

• ir10 + doctoral colloquium
• ‘Critical voices in the Australian political blogosphere’ (Bruns, Highfield, Kirchhoff, Nicolai)
• ‘Themes and discussions from eight months in the French political blogosphere’ (Highfield)

Projects, institutes, and groups visited/discussed

• Mapping Main Street, which was presented at:
• Berkman Center for Internet & Society
• MACOSPOL (Mapping Controversies on Science for Politics) and
• Mapping Controversies from:
• médialab de Sciences Po
• rtgi/linkfluence

Campuses

• Stanford
• University of Washington
• Harvard
• MIT
• Sciences-Po
• Université libre de Bruxelles
• Curtin University of Technology
• University of Western Australia

Exhibitions, shows, galleries, and museums

• Milwaukee Art Museum [including Andy Warhol: the Last Decade and an infinity chamber]
• Art Institute of Chicago
• Shedd Aquarium
• California Academy of Sciences
• Open-Source Embroidery at:
• Museum of Craft and Folk Art, San Francisco
• ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ (Tom Stoppard) by ACT (A Contemporary Theater) at Allen Theater, Seattle
• Mapparium at the Mary Baker Eddy Library, Boston
• Centre Georges Pompidou

Books read

• Juliet, Naked – Nick Hornby
• Gentlemen of the Road – Michael Chabon
• Everything is Illuminated – Jonathan Safran Foer
• Bicycle Diaries – David Byrne

Cities

• Chicago
• Milwaukee
• San Francisco
• Palo Alto
• Seattle
• New Orleans
• Boston
• Paris
• Bruxelles
• Perth

Transport

• 13 flights
• 10 trains
• 28 metro/subway rides
• 16 buses
• 7 taxis
• 4 trams
• 2 ferries
• 1 monorail
• 1 bike
• a lot of walking…

The two presentations I was involved in at ir10, looking at the Australian and French political blogospheres, both happened earlier today. Axel has already posted the slides from the Australian paper, ‘Critical Voices in the Australian Political Blogosphere’, over at his blog, along with the many recaps of other papers from the conference. So, here are the slides for the French blog-oriented paper, renamed to ‘Themes and discussions from eight months in the French political blogosphere’. The slides aren’t much to look at, a lot wordier than I’d like normally, but given the time in carrying out the study to get to a point where it could be presented, the words were as much a reference for me as information for the audience! Obviously the work is very preliminary, but there should be more coming out of both papers in the next few months.

I am currently in the US, on my way to Milwaukee for the Association of Internet Researchers conference. With pre-conference seminars tomorrow, it promises to be a busy few days from here until Saturday night. I’ve got a few different things happening as well as attending as many sessions as possible. Tomorrow is the doctoral colloquium, where there will be a few OIISDP alumni as well as new faces with whom to discuss research topics and issues. Following that, on Friday morning is a session featuring a paper Axel Bruns, Thomas Nicolai, Lars Kirchhoff, and myself have been working on, looking at activity in the Australian political blogosphere over the first half of 2009. Finally, and indeed in the same session, is a paper I’ve been working on covering pretty much the same period, but looking at the French political blogosphere – it’s the first look at French data I’ve had, so this is very much a tentative preliminary study, with some methodological issues to be taken into account for future work, but it should also raise some interesting directions for the next phase of work in both the French and Australian political blogospheres.

Post-Milwaukee, I’ve got a bit of travel happening, before some institution visits in Boston and Paris, but more on those later. A bit closer to/after the presentations, I’ll try and get the slides uploaded and any interesting outcomes from the papers. I won’t be liveblogging, although Axel probably will be, but any diversionary comments from me will most likely be on twitter!

• 37 People You Should Follow for Infographics on Twitter [Cool Infographics]
• The 'Web Squared' Era [Forbes.com]

• Tony Martin: No laughing matter [the Age]
  Tony Martin on British comedy (mostly c.mid-90s) that didn't make it to Australia. Choice quote: "To live in a country where every series of My Hero has been screened in prime time while Father Ted was on after midnight… is to live in a country where everyone's heard the Tin Machine albums but no one even knows about Ziggy Stardust."
  (tags: tv comedy)

A first attempt at an experiment, and not a particularly rigorous one at that, in tracking information flows through Twitter.

On Monday afternoon (31 August), Australian-time, a new YouTube video was publicised*. There’s nothing particularly unusual in that, except that this particular video concerned Perth. The capital city of Western Australia, Perth is both extremely isolated and not always seen as the most exciting of places – being often scathingly referred to using terms such as ‘Dullsville’. So, when a three-minute video mocking aspects of Perth life and making up other information (possibly qualifying as what John Hartley describes as silly citizenship, but that’s for another time), hit YouTube, it quickly spread through Twitter, Facebook, and into the blogosphere, as Perth locals and expats (of which I am one) became aware of it.

Before going further, this is the video, made by Vincenzo Perrella and Dan Osborn and entitled This is Perth:

So, this gently mocking, amusing video was made, people watched it, told their friends. This can be tracked anecdotally; my personal experience of the video started at around 5pm Brisbane-time (all times from now on will be Brisbane time, despite this concerning Perth data – what I grabbed from Twitter was in my local time, and I did not want to overcomplicate things by starting to change times, especially since I was manually collecting the data. For Perth time, subtract two hours from Brisbane time), when Tama re-tweeted the link to the video. At this point, the RT was at least three steps down the line from its source, and the video itself was at around 350 views. Within a couple of hours, it had appeared three times on my friend feed in Facebook, within 24 hours it was up to 9000 views on YouTube, in 48 was well worth 35,000, and was at over 48,000 views at the time of writing. Links were also appearing in friends’ blog posts, and as the video spread, the media coverage grew too**. However, this isn’t the most precise or admissible form of measuring what had happened.

The most visible signs of people noticing the video and telling other people, at least from Brisbane, were through the likes of Twitter and Facebook. Searching Facebook for data was not the most successful of tasks, and indeed the variety of privacy settings can make finding content such as posted links hard to locate. Casually browsing livejournal posts and using blog search engines provided more results, but the re-tweeting activity on Twitter was the most immediately enticing option – it may be advantageous to return to the blogs and grab that data too, for comparison, but for now the only data source is Twitter.

The data set covering ‘This is Perth’-related tweets was obtained through multiple searches of Twitter, repeated over a couple of days to track new tweets. Without being as inclusive as possible, these searches attempted to locate as many tweets made between 31 August and 3 September linking to the video, discussing it or the articles on the West and PerthNow already covering it. Search terms included ‘This is Perth’, #thisisperth, and the various bit.ly and tinyurl addresses linking to the video, while further tweets were found by following the RT trails. The advantage of Twitter as opposed to Facebook was the prevalence of publicly accessible tweets; where locked posts were found, they were not included in the sample. However, if an RT included a user who had locked posts, the user was still included in the network created to show, where possible, the Twitter users acting as source nodes and hubs.

After the latest round of searches, carried out at 2pm Brisbane time, 227 tweets had been collected, not including those made by bots***. These had been made by, or took material from, 201 Twitter users. Of these users, 149 had specified a unique location, or made it apparent in their tweets – unsurprisingly, the majority of posts from which location could be determined came from Perth (92 tweets), with Sydney (16) and Melbourne (12) the next highest contributing cities. Outside of Australia, only nine tweets were from users declaring they were located internationally, with content being posted from the US, UK, Singapore, Canada, the Netherlands, and Malaysia. Such behaviour may be because of the localised nature of the video – for example, without knowing anything about Perth, the video may not be entertaining or interesting. Similarly, for people in or from Perth, seeing a video sending up their town may have meant some kind of connection with the video, and subsequently meant that it was passed on to friends, sharing the joke.

While geographically the mentions of the video were centred on Perth, time-wise the four hours after the video was first tweeted saw the highest activity; the earliest mention found in these searches was at 3.55pm on 31 August, with 25 additional tweets by 5pm and 41 between 5pm and 6pm. These coincided with the novelty of the video, spreading it when there was a good chance other people hadn’t seen it, and also with the end of the working day in Perth (peaking between 3pm and 4pm Perth-time). The WA-dominance of the coverage can be seen in the graph above. The graph depicts the number of tweets in hourly blocks, with the periods of little or no activity correspond with early hours of the morning, while the small increases in posting on Tuesday are during the work day and, in particular, the 7pm – 10pm period – however, these periods still contain less than 10 tweets an hour relating to the video. [The graph does not feature the last tweets from Wednesday night, when A Current Affair had a story on the video, as the exact time posted could not be determined, being in the format around 16 hours ago]

While the video hits continued to increase over the period covered here, Twitter coverage died down quickly, with occasional flurries of re-tweets as people who had not seen it earlier discovered it and passed it on. However, the longest chains of re-tweets occured in the first hours of the Twitter activity. The network visualisation above shows each Twitter user (excluding bots) featured in the sample as a node. The visualisation uses directed edges – the connections are not necessarily reciprocal links between users, but show a one-way link from one source user to a second user who may have either directly replied to a tweet or re-tweeted the work of the first user. Many nodes are not connected to others, having posted once and not been re-tweeted or not discussing it further with other users (at least, in a way that the particular searches used here would have found). There are also several small groups of two or three nodes, showing one user responding to or re-tweeting the post of another user. Most notably, there is a large, connected system of nodes in the middle of the visualisation, and for the most part these are connections that were made, or build from those made, in the first few hours of the Twitter coverage.

This closer look at the visualisation shows several paths for information flows, originating at a few source nodes. The longest paths contain nine nodes – starting at SixThousand, the Perth edition of a national network of subcultural e-newsletters and guides, re-tweets flow through people connected with The West Australian, and eventually crossed the country, reaching, for example, Fake Stephen Conroy, a popular Australian user satirising the Federal Communications Minister. To get to the end of these longest paths only took three hours from when SixThousand posted the first link – and by that point the number of tweets per hour covering the video was already declining.

The point of this exercise was not to claim anything about the nature of interpersonal communication using Twitter, or in Perth, or anything of that nature. For one thing, the data set is far too small to make any conclusions about information flows, while not looking at other data from additional sources such as Facebook or blogs means that a wider overview of the spread of the This is Perth video is lacking. Similarly, private communication such as email (the primary way I personally told friends about it) is not represented here. The main aim, instead, was to examine how to mine data from Twitter and what to do with it. The work here is a useful starting point for carrying out larger processes, ideally using automated tools such as NodeXL. One particular aspect I would have liked to cover here, and may do so later, is a comparison of the main connected group in the visualisation above and the actual followers of these users, whether what is depicted above shows information crossing groups or whether there is a high degree of interlinking amongst a group of friends.

In the meantime, what is shown is a short-lived burst of activity surrounding an amusing video about Perth, that quickly spread amongst a number of people either from or with connections to Perth, and then became a less prominent topic. While some coverage, such as last night’s A Current Affair story, and discussion of the video has appeared since the peak buzz surrounding it, activity hit a definite peak very early on – possibly reaching saturation point amongst a small audience? – and as the video itself has continued to gain hits, there just might not be any need to keep publicising it…

The network visualisation was made using GUESS, the graph through ManyEyes

* And possibly uploaded; the video’s page says 30 August, as opposed to 31, but there may be time difference issues.
** For example, stories posted on PerthNow and the West online, radio coverage on Nova 93.7, and a story on A Current Affair.
*** This may be a point of contention, as bots may be seen as further publicising the content and making it visible to more users, but for this initial work they have been excluded as the chain of re-tweets ended with them.

• Networks are Killing Science [Scientific Blogging]
  (tags: complexity networks science theory)

Incredibly busy non-thesis times recently, presenting at the ANZCA conference a couple of weeks ago and also attending the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme (both being held here at QUT). I’m not going to write about what happened at either, not at the moment at least, but a quick plug that the OIISDP is a not-to-be-missed opportunity if you’re a postgrad looking at some aspect of internet research (and that of course entails anything from copyright law to e-health to online activism to cyberinfrastructure to online social networks and so on and so forth), and is extremely highly recommended. As is having a short break afterwards to recover. As such, I’m flying to Perth tomorrow, although I will also be working on further outcomes from the paper I presented at ANZCA and preparing for the AoIR conference in Milwaukee in October – attending the pre-conference colloquium and presenting at the conference itself.

For both the SDP and ANZCA I had to present, so I’m including the presentations below; I was testing out an online tool called Prezi at the time, so they’re a little more involved/transition-y than a standard powerpoint presentation, but I hope I’ve avoided giving anyone motion sickness through them. I may return to a more traditional format for AoIR, although the paper itself may determine that. The SDP presentation is an overview of (some of) my PhD research project, if you want to know about that: http://prezi.com/121901/

The ANZCA presentation is ‘Inauguration from afar: Mapping Obama discussion in the Australian political blogosphere‘ – basically a pilot study for my PhD, taking blog and online news media site content from the week before and week after the inauguration of Barack Obama in January 2009, and seeing what was discussed. There will be more to come out of this, the presentation was a very preliminary study, but for some details on what I said, and indeed what many other presentations at ANZCA covered, Axel liveblogged many, many sessions… http://prezi.com/121009/

Last year, the Internet & Democracy team at the Berkman Center at Harvard released a study of the Persian language blogosphere, a key work in larger-scale, non-English-language blogosphere research. (And of course, although I’m not going to discuss current events in Iran, the use of social media, twitter in particular, has been a subject of news reports recently (regardless of its relative importance, biases, etc.)). The I&D team have just released a new study, this time of the Arabic blogosphere – taking in Egyptian, Saudi, Kuwaiti, and Syrian blogs, and covering clusters and bridges in three languages (Arabic, English, French – although my treatment of ‘French’ in the current version of my research is looking at the country rather than the language, the use of French in northern Africa provides an additional, possible group of sites to study). I’ve just downloaded the pdf of the new report, so no comments on that yet, but if you want to have a look at it, it’s at the I&D site.