As a first piece of work that builds on QUT’s new Digital Observatory – a collaboration between the QUT Institute for Future Environments and the QUT Digital Media Research Centre – I’m pleased to share a new live dashboard showing overall trends in the Australian Twittersphere.

This builds on our prior work to identify Australian Twitter accounts and map the network structure of the Australian Twittersphere (covered at The Conversation and published in Social Media + Society), and tracks the public posting activities of some 500,000 Australian Twitter accounts on a continuous, real-time basis. For this general overview, we’re pulling out the major hashtags and the most mentioned accounts (counting both @mentions and retweets) – but of course the underlying dataset captures far more than this.

If you’re interested in further research that builds on this dataset, please get in touch!

(Click ‘full screen’ to enlarge.)