Mapping Online Publics is a research project pursued by researchers Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess of the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia and Lar Kirchoff and Thomas Nicolai of Sociomantic Labs (Private network analytics2.0 company- Berlin).
Mapping Online Publics ‘addresses the problem of scale in online personal communications and the need for disciplinary renewal in media, cultural and communications studies’ (Burgess, 2010). The project is interested in ‘computer-assisted cultural analysis; tacking, mapping and analysing blogs. twitter, flickr, and youtube as ‘networked publics’’ (Burgess, 2010).
Mapping Online Publics is based on the notion that the development of social media sees the convergence of user generated or shared content, online social networks, and communication. The theoretical framework of the project is that personal communicative ecologies constitute public communication. This means that tracking levels of activity, topics of interest, changes over time, and relation to other media, allows the researchers to address questions regarding the formation of communities and network around issues, the dynamic of interaction between issues and networks, and the interplay between personal communication and the formation of ‘networked publics’. (Burgess 2010)
Although the Mapping Online Publics project is in its early stages the project has tested a variety of tools for a multimodal analysis of both blogs and twitter. The researchers use Gawk, Leximancer and Wordstat for textual analysis of posts, have engaged link analysis on blog networks, while using a tool developed inhouse, Twapperkeeper, for crawling and archiving tweets. Gephi the socalled ‘photoshop for graphs’ has been used successfully to demonstrate the potential for a time based visualisation of the ‘life’ of issues as the develop and subside in twitter using both the content of tweets and networks formed of hashtags and replies.
A recent presentation published online by Jean Burgess, and examples posted on the project’s blog show the potential for the rich visualisation of issues playing out in the blogosphere and on twitter during the Australia Federal 2010 election campaign.