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Developing methods of tracking distributed political discourse

∘ Barry Saunders∘ PhD candidate, Creative

Industries QUT∘ http://investigativeblog.net ∘ http://gatewatching.org ∘ Research draws on

Opportunities in Citizen Journalism ARC Linkage project

Comic: http://xkcd.com/386/

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Thanks to

‒ Axel Bruns, Terry Flew, Kay Saunders

‒ Jason Wilson, Tim Highfield

‒ Thomas Nicholai, Lars Kirchhoff

‒ SBS, Online Opinion, Cisco, the Brisbane Institute and QUT

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The problem

‒ Visualising and tracking political discussion on blogs and websites

‒ Network mapping (linkfluence) is only one aspect of the question

‒ Google Pagerank is useful but limited

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Network mapping approaches‒ From http://linkfluence.net/

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Issues with this approach

‒ Useful for identifying a static social network

‒ But blog conversations are often not static

‒ Also does not look at conversations themselves, simply linkages, privileges bloggers over the community

‒ Can mistake blogrolls for article links

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So then

‒ A multilevel, iterative palimpsestic approach

‒ Tools: Issuecrawler

‒ Leximancer

‒ datascraper

‒ Excel

‒ Many Eyes

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approach

‒ Choose issue and common search terms‒ Choose parameters‒ Develop seed list ‒ Plug into Issuecrawler‒ Take generated URLs and add to datascraper‒ Take scraped data and add to Leximancer‒ Take Leximancer data and add to Many Eyes

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Case Study

‒ Australian political blogosphere

‒ Search term “Australian 2020 Summit”

‒ Generated seeds using Blogs.com.au

‒ Fed into Issuecrawler

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Issuecrawler map 2020

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Detail

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Detail

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Leximancer

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Leximancer

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Many eyes

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Club Troppo associated term frequency - “Labor”

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Larvatus Prodeo associated term frequency: “Labor”

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Ongoing research

‒ Many-eyes can be used to track term frequency over time

‒ Looking to map term frequency against linkages

‒ Develop tools for visualising changes over time, with discussion terms, linkages and quantity and popularity of posts mapped

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Ongoing research

‒ Understanding development of political discussion online

‒ Methods for tracking political opinion as we move to post-broadcast environment without necessarily clearly defined opinion leaders

‒ Information for understand notions of the public sphere in the age of the internet