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A ‘Big Data’ Approach to Mapping the Australian Twittersphere

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Advancing Digital Humanities

Abstract

The widespread adoption of leading social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in much of the developed world has also led to a rise in research projects across the humanities and social sciences that seek to investigate and analyse the emerging uses of these platforms. A substantial number of such research projects have applied existing communication and cultural research methodologies to this task, including qualitative approaches (for example, the close reading of textual and communicative artefacts sourced from these platforms, or the ethnographic study of specific users and user communities) and quantitative methods (such as surveys of users to examine their attitudes and activities, in order to explore larger behavioural patterns).

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© 2014 Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess and Tim Highfield

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Bruns, A., Burgess, J., Highfield, T. (2014). A ‘Big Data’ Approach to Mapping the Australian Twittersphere. In: Arthur, P.L., Bode, K. (eds) Advancing Digital Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137337016_8

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