Here, we look at the shift in conversation as the tournament begins to take shape – who is excited, bored or really winning on Twitter? – but first, a taste of what’s happening on social media in Brazil.

The opening ceremony and first match, Brazil vs Croatia, were huge successes on television and on social media. Brazilians, of course, probably talked about nothing else that day – but in Brazil, much of what was said was politicised.

FIFA was massively criticised for choosing a Belgian producer over Brazilians for the opening ceremony.

Francamente ! Na terra de Paulo Barros e Rosa Magalhães chamam um belga pra fazer uma bobagem de abertura destas!

— Leda Nagle (@Lnagle2) June 12, 2014

Translation: Honestly! In the land of Paulo Barros and Rosa Magalhães [two of the most successful Brazilian Carnival producers] they called a Belgian to do a silly opening like this!
– Leda Nagle, Brazilian journalist.

Another major disappointment was the disappearance on the official FIFA images of the moment that a paraplegic gave the initial kick-off using a mind-controlled exoskeleton built by the Brazilian scientist Miguel Nicolelis.

O genial exoesqueleto usado pelo rapaz que daria o primeiro chute infelizmente se perdeu na transmissão da abertura. Uma pena.

— Fernando Meirelles (@fmei7777) June 12, 2014

Translation: The exoskeleton worn by the guy that would do the kick-off unfortunately got lost in the opening broadcast. What a pity.
Source: Fernando Meirelles, Brazilian film-maker.

E teve exoesqueleto mesmo. Lamentável o desprezo total da transmissão ao que deveria ter o principal destaque. pic.twitter.com/PqDN9MUSEI

— Impedimento (@impedimento) June 12, 2014

Translation: And there was the exoskeleton indeed. Regrettable the complete disdain in the broadcast to something that should be in the spotlight.
Source: Impedimento, popular website dedicated to South American football and culture.

Still, others strongly criticised the crowd chants attacking the Brazilian president.

Parte do estádio grita: “Ê Dilma, vai tomar no c.. “. Outros gritam: “Ê Fifa, vai tomar no c…”

— Jamil Chade (@JamilChade) June 12, 2014

Translation: Part of the stadium shouts: hey, Dilma, f* off. Others shout: hey, Fifa, f* off.
Source: Jamil Chade, Brazilian journalist.

Updating the top matches

In our last article, we noted that Brazil vs Croatia was the most talked about match on its official hashtag (#BRAvsCRO), some distance ahead of England vs Italy, which was closely followed by Germany vs Portugal, Spain vs the Netherlands and Argentina vs Bosnia and Herzegovina. The updated chart, through the matches of June 21, looks as follows:

Of particular note here is that we have a new leader, in the Brazil vs Mexico match (an otherwise unspectacular 0-0 draw), with the Argentina vs Iran fixture (a 1-0 Argentina win, which Iran looked like winning at times) in second place.

The prominence of these two matches raises questions of whether people look to Twitter to fill in boring games, as well as to comment on exciting ones. The next three are familiar fixtures from the first week of matches.

Many of those at the bottom are the result of people using reversed hashtags in their tweets. Noticing this for the England vs Uruguay fixture, we also tracked the reverse hashtag specifically (#ENGvsURU), and recorded in excess of 27,000 tweets compared to 88,236 on the official hashtag (#URUvsENG).

So, while the official hashtags are performing as some form of marker, their success is not universal. One explanation for this is that while in Europe, the standard form is “Home Team vs Away Team”, for Americans the familiar format is “Away Team vs Home Team”, and so ordering hashtags for international audiences can be difficult.

What’s being shared?

Last time, we discussed how brands were dominating the conversation on official World Cup hashtags. This time, we’ll take a look at what is being shared on the match hashtags themselves.

As with last week’s data, we again see @worldsoccershop heavily represented, with their offer to give away free shirts if you retweet and a specific event happens (such as Ronaldo scoring in the Germany vs Portugal match) drawing a massive response.

Tellingly, the other tweets are largely dominated by US related content, the top two being ESPN responses (@Sportscenter being an ESPN-operated account) to the US’s victory over Ghana.

The first non-US tweet comes from the UK’s Sky Sports, and their @SkyFootball account, asking for responses on a penalty in the Brazil Game. Sky, interestingly, are not broadcasting the World Cup in the UK.

Other notables in the top 20 include celebrities such as Piers Morgan and Kobe Bryant, the US’s Comedy Channel (also not a World Cup broadcaster), asking Americans to “RT if you think WE WILL WIN”, and a quote from an unofficial Simpsons Quote Of The Day account, but really, @worldsoccershop was the huge winner.

The limitations of the 1%

As we discussed last time, the representativeness of Twitter research by those not subscribing to data providers such as GNIP is unclear with the World Cup, as Twitter traffic continually exceeds 1% of the total amount of tweets published at any particular time.

The flip-side of that limitation is we are able to graph the times at which conversation around the World Cup; through the team accounts, tournament hashtags, match hashtags and television hashtags we are tracking, exceeds that 1%, and by how far.

Of course, at any particular time, there are also many tweets relating to the World Cup which do not contain any of the previously mentioned identifiers:

The blue indicators in the graph above are the number of total tweets per second that exceeded 1% of total Twitter traffic.

Notable is that the World Cup is generating a smaller portion of the total Twitter traffic as it continues – which may not be much of a surprise – but also that while the opener generated the most prolonged period of >1% traffic, the matches on the morning of June 14 AEST (the matches of June 13 in Brazil) were the most prolific of the tournament on a per-second basis, with a particular peak during Spain’s demolition by the Netherlands.

It has yet to be seen how the next phase of the tournament will play out, and least of all what role Twitter will play; whether as a tool for excitement or boredom.

The authors do not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article. They also have no relevant affiliations.

This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Read the original article.

Following on from the amazing experience that was the CCI Winter School, we decided it was time for a change of temperature and switched it up by travelling to Toronto for the Oxford Internet Institute’s Summer Doctoral Programme (OII SDP). Held at the iSchool at the University of Toronto, the SDP brought together 28 students from around the world for two weeks of seminars, workshops and collaboration.

It is difficult to overstate how valuable the SDP experience is, not only for the experiences and knowledge gained from being involved in such an intensive programme, but also for the relationships that were formed. In fact relationships seemed to be a key theme of the conference. Relationships between society and technology, between traditional and new methods, between researchers and the objects they study.

There was an incredibly diverse range of projects being undertaken by participants (from fields ranging from law to geography), however there was enough overlap among theoretical frameworks and perspectives that made feedback and engaging in conversation with our fellow participants a valuable and often enlightening experience. Among the student presentations there were a number of studies using Twitter data and some using Facebook data, however there were also a number of projects that focused on non-traditional or non-commercial parts of the internet such as peer-to-peer sharing, Bitcoin, Ushahidi, Open Street Map and citizen science.  Among the projects there was also recognition of the mutual shaping effects of both technology and society, and that the relationships between different actors are complex and worthy of further investigation. There is a trend toward examining how the technologies we are researching are constructed, and by whom. For while we all acknowledge that we are drawing from a solid base of existing theory, we also recognise the need to critically analyse the theories we are using and how they apply particularly in relation to Internet Studies and our own projects.

The amazing OII SDP 2013 group. From QUT: Ana Vimieiro and Barbara Gligorijevic (the leftmost two in the front row), and Kim Osman (front row, with the yellow cardigan). Also from CCI: Luke Gaspard, PhD Candidate at RMIT (the last one on the right).

Another relationship that stood out in the discussions was between traditional and innovative methodological approaches. Indeed, one of the visible commonalities among the students was this concern for techniques and tools, and this was also a recurring topic in the mentors’ presentations. For instance, Sara Grimes discussed how she approached the relationship between old and new methods using an interpretive and multi-method research design. Her approach combines content, design, discourse and textual analyses, with techniques such as interviews, observation, surveys and creative methods to investigate digital games.

Similarly, many of the participants are adopting a mixed-method perspective in their projects. Social network analysis, content analysis, in-depth interviews, surveys and so on: they were all mentioned, many as part of the same research design. Digital methods, the digitalisation of conventional processes (such as better practices for recording interviews and coding texts), and the combination of human research techniques with digital tools were all discussed. There was an interest in and openness to the possibilities and affordances of innovative methods and in combining these with more traditional approaches.

A more tenuous relationship and one that is still being negotiated, is the relationship between ourselves, as researchers, and the communities we study. As many of us are members of the community we are researching, questions were raised among participants about the ethics of engaging with community members and the artefacts they produce. Opinions varied both within the group and from the invited mentors as to what extent informed consent from community members is needed when undertaking such research. Is a forum discussion published text, or a personal conversation among members? Do you need to disclose your status as a researcher in one part of the community, when your research object is an unrelated part of that community? After considerable discussion, these are still very much open questions. Eric Meyer posed quite a nice way to frame these questions however – we need to think of the researchers who will come after us.

We therefore came home then with a myriad of things to reflect upon: research design, ethical issues, and our place and responsibilities as researchers in a wider social context. The SDP also provided us with the forum to engage with established scholars such as Barry Wellman (who gave the opening keynote), to SDP alumni who shared their experiences as emerging scholars who were not long ago sitting where we were. Even among the participants, who were all at varying stages of their research, there were different perspectives reflecting different academic traditions. We were challenged to think about our own research, think about the assumptions we are making, the perspectives and traditions we are continuing and those that we are questioning as new generation of researchers.

So in the end many new relationships were formed, the most valuable of those the friendships made among a group of outstanding and wonderful internet researchers from around the world who will be colleagues in the years to come. With such a variety of approaches, perspectives, experience and knowledge among the group it would in fact have been very strange if we had not come home with so many things to reflect upon! And that is pretty much what we have been doing since then.

If you enjoyed our brief account, check this link out: http://wiki.oii.ox.ac.uk/doku/doku.php/sdp:sdp2013:readings
It is the complete program, with abstracts for each session and suggested readings.

So, Twitter is definitely not the most popular social media site there, but it has been central for football fandom communities since 2009, when Twitter started to grow in Brazil. The interest-based nature of Twitter conversations and the fact that key fans in the clubs’ communities migrated from Orkut to Twitter both may have contributed to this. Furthermore, most sport journalists have accounts on Twitter, making it more attractive for devoted fans to engage in “expert” conversations.

Altogether, this makes the Brazilian Twitterland an interesting space to understand what football fans have been up to online. As a departing point, Twitter data is able to show a good snapshot of the online everyday practices of those fans. And this is actually a rather non-explored research topic. Even though Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other spaces have been used for sport-related conversation and sport fan production, those practices have not received substantial attention from either social sciences or humanities scholars so far (Gibbons & Dixon, 2010). Different from the pop culture fandom area, where the implications of the Internet and other ICTs have been widely explored in the last decade, there is not much empirical work around the formation of online sport fandom communities.

Particularly about Twitter, two papers approaching football have recently come to my attention, showing that this topic is starting to spark interest. The first one, titled “Twitter and Sports: Football Fandom in Emerging and Established markets”, is a collaboration by CCI colleagues Axel Bruns and Stephen Harrington with the German-based researcher Katrin Weller. This paper will be published soon in the collection Twitter and Society and approaches football clubs in Australia, Germany, and England. The second one, “Changing the Game? The Impact of Twitter on Relationships between Football Clubs, Supporters and the Sports Media“, by John Price, Neil Farrington, and Lee Hall, was published very recently in a 2013 edition of the journal Soccer & Society. Both papers shed light to how professional clubs are managing their communication with fan bases on Twitter. And, importantly, both studies are based on empirical data from Twitter and other sources.

My PhD project and this brief post intend to look at sport-related conversations on Twitter from another angle. I am focusing on fan conversations and fandom activities performed online. So, instead of collecting data posted to or from the official accounts of clubs, I am doing it by keywords, particularly, clubs’ names and nicknames.

It is a challenge to gather such an archive. Some clubs in Brazil have names that are also common nouns. Furthermore, to find out which nicknames and other expressions fans use to talk about their clubs is a challenge in itself. Not to mention the fact that some names/nicknames are also words in other languages than Portuguese. After a couple of tests, I came up with this method that seems to be working more or less fine:

1) I use the name and one nickname for each club; the nickname was chosen after I tested some options and the one that was able to capture the most/best data was adopted;

2) I am applying a series of filters after collecting the data, starting from considering only messages in Portuguese;

3) Another important filter is a list of words to get only football-related tweets (for instance, Flamengo, a famous Brazilian club, is also the name of a suburb in Rio). This list includes the name of current players, coach and other important staff of each club when processing the data of that particular club, plus a list of usual words related to football such as goal, championship, referee and so on. Everything that does not have any of these expressions is excluded at this point;

4) And last but not least, a filter to exclude football-related tweets that are however not related to a particular club. For instance, two professional clubs in Brazil have the same name: one is Atlético-MG and the other one is Atlético-PR, with the acronym at the very end indicating the state from where they are from. So, the Atlético-MG’s data had to be filtered to not include “paraná” or “paranaense”, expressions used to refer to the other club. And, in this particular case, the use, for instance, of “Atlético-MG” as a keyword is not a good option because supporters of this club do not call it “Atlético-MG”.

After testing a few times the methods for collecting/filtering tweets, I ended up with a dataset comprised almost entirely of football-related tweets and a dataset that also seems to match the size of the fan bases of each club. My analysis here includes the 12 football clubs with the largest fan bases in Brazil, and the data was collected using yourTwapperkeeper.

Initial data and brief considerations

Below, I present some charts with data from the first week of the top division of the 2013 Brazilian Championship (the série A of the Campeonato Brasileiro or Brasileirão). Actually, it is a six-day period, containing 516,444 tweets after all the filtering.

The first chart is basically the amount of messages by day. This particular chart is deeply influenced by the transfer of Neymar to Barcelona. Neymar is a young talented Brazilian footballer who announced he was moving from Santos to Barcelona exactly in this week. This is the reason why there are so many messages about Santos, which is a popular club but has only the 7th largest fan base in Brazil. The other clubs’ conversations just follow the pattern: when the team is on the pitch, fans post more messages.

The second chart (below) is more interesting because it reveals a clear pattern in the fan conversations: a decrease in the proportion of URLs being shared on match-days. It occurs with all clubs every time they played in this interval (most of them played twice).

Thus, this particular chart demonstrates the nature of the conversations when the team is playing: more spontaneous, with a celebratory or protest vein. Also, when considering the type of message they are sharing in each particular moment (the chart below is an example using data for Flamengo), the proportion of original tweets tends to be higher on match-days, and the level of genuine replies tends to decrease, on the other hand. However, this particular pattern is not a rule, because there seem to be some differences depending on the result of the match and whether the team is playing at home or away.

In any case, on match-days there is a propensity to less interaction. Furthermore, my method is not able to capture messages that do not use the name or nickname of the club. And it is important to note that fans very often post messages celebrating goals and complaining about players with no mention to the club’s name or nickname. It is likely that this type of message increases on match-days.

Another series of charts I created showcases domains shared by users per club. The image below is the general chart (for an enhanced view, click on the image), with all domains shared in all conversations. The chart for each club can be accessed by clicking on the image. Particularly, the charts with club-specific data show, for instance, those blogs and other user-generated content spaces that have more significance for each community. The presence of traditional media outlets is very strong in those charts, revealing continuity patterns concerning sports audiences in a new media environment.

I am also trying to visualise which domains are most shared on a daily basis. The chart below is an example of what I am trying to do (again, click on the image for a better visualisation).

So, for instance, in this chart, Flamengo’s fans are sharing Twitter (mostly, photos), Instagram, and Facebook links in the match-day – Flamengo only played on the 26^th in this period. Furthermore, the presence of Globoesporte.globo.com, the online portal of the largest media conglomerate in Brazil, slightly decreases in the day preceding the match. Now, I am comparing distinct clubs over a longer period to understand when they are sharing links to YouTube, Instagram, Foursquare and other platforms. But some interesting phenomena have already emerged: for example, blog posts seem to be shared mostly in the days preceding the matches and on the day immediately after, a pattern that follows the routines of most fan blogs. Instagram and Foursquare links are mostly shared on match-days, and YouTube videos seem to be shared in a higher proportion on the day immediately after matches.

Wrapping up

The most important aspect that I got from this preliminary analysis is that some fan initiatives are rather influential over the fan bases they talk about. Less than marginal, sometimes their significance over the conversations is suggestive. For instance, take the case of Atlético-MG as an example. Atlético-MG’s official account (@sitedogalo) has around 100,000 followers. Fan initiatives such as @cam1sado2e (a type of collective site, where fans publish videos, photos, short stories, anecdotes, chronicles, biographical stories and so on), and @webradiogalo (a fan produced radio/TV that does live commentary during the matches) have almost 15,000 followers each, a considerable amount – and they are probably not buying followers. Yet, @webradiogalo’s YouTube channel has as many views as some clubs’ official accounts – its videos were watched around 2.2 million times, which is similar to how many times Fluminense’s official videos were played (2.7 million), for instance. And those two initiatives are not unique: all fan bases have things like those being produced and largely shared.