Social Media Data: Twitter Scraping on

NeCTARJonathon Hutchinson, Jeremy Hammond, Fiona

Martin, Daniel Yazbek

Digital Humanities Conference, University of Sydney - June 2015

Why Research Social Media?

• Ephemeral, temporary, banal content

• Duality of hyperbole in social media (use vs. used)

• Economics: large user base but no profit model (Twitter especially)

• But… Everyone’s doing it, which prompts us to research

@dhutchman

What are the challenges?

• Ephemeral

• Negotiating public/private/intimate boundaries

• Individual + collective ethics, distributed responsibility

• Ethics

• Access/representative of users/populations

• Skills - researcher skills also

• Policy and law

@dhutchman

Opportunities…• New perspectives/methodologies

• New research questions

• Access to newly found communities

• Immediacy

• All media are social, but social media transverses all of them

• Advance skills as a researcher and as students

@dhutchman

Our interests…

• Identify actors, agency and roles

• Map networks and identify communicative patterns

• Explore how agency impacts a networked society (challenging dominant discourses)

• Establish how networked communication intersects with institutions/organisations

• Identify emerging social network mediated trends/habits

• Investigate aspects of policy & governance

@dhutchman

ResearchHypothesis

“Conduct Research”

Communicate

@jeremy5211

Digital ResearchHypothesis

“Conduct Research”

Communicate

“Stuff” goes in

Knowledge comes out

@jeremy5211

Digital Research

NCRIS, see

education.gov.au/national-collaborative-research-infrastructure-strategy-ncris

$2.5 billion (since 2004)

Digital ResearchHypothesis

“Conduct Research”

Communicate

“Stuff” goes in

Knowledge comes out

@jeremy5211

1. Define data set2. Collect data3. Analyse data4. Test hypothesis5. Hypothesis evolution6. Repeat 1-5

ResearchHypothesis

“Conduct Research”

Communicate

@jeremy5211

1. Define data set twitter data on #dh2015

2. Collect data launchpod.intersect.org.au

launchpod.intersect.org.au

nectar.org.au/research-cloud

apps.twitter.com

Example Outputhttp://146.118.96.19/1/http://146.118.96.19/logs/log.log

@jeremy5211

Digital Research

MECO and Launchpod• Mobile Media - http://www.mobileinternetresearch.net/

• ABC #7DaysLater (Hutchinson, 2015)

• Online Journalism (O’Donnell & Hutchinson, 2015)

• #OurABC, #OurSBS (Martin, forthcoming)

• #KoinUntuk (Goggin, Hutchinson, Hammond, Goodwin, forthcoming)

• NSW #Playsafe (Goodwin & Hutchinson, forthcoming)

• #SydneySeige (Sinpeng & Hutchinson, forthcoming)

• Interests developing in #ISIS, #DoubleJ, #HeavyMetal, #China

• Basis for the Digital Methods Research Working Group, ANZCA