Ozzie Sport

I wanted to create a map of where people who were following Australian political candidates and/or tweeting about the Australian elections were living. I’ve been getting similar data for Australian sport teams and this feels like a natural extension. I’m not doing an analysis of this data and these maps because while I feel I know enough about Australian sport to draw conclusions, I don’t feel comfortable with Australian politics. If some one else wants to do that or use my raw data, please feel free.

Just as a caveat, this is a limited data set that was collected on the morning of July 19, 2010. I used a tool to mine this and the amount of data included was based on what that tool gave me.

Data Collection Methodology

1. Identify the major candidates in the Australian elections on Twitter (Tony Abbot, Bob Brown, Julia Gillard) and some of the more popular search phrases and hash tags used by Twitter users (#alp vote, #aus2010, #ausvotes, #laborfail, #myliberal, #nocleanfeed , #qanda, Abbott-Gillard, asylum boat, Gillard, Greens Canberra, Krudd Labor, Labor Liberals, Rudd Liberals, Tony Abbott, Truss LNP, Warren Truss, WorkChoices)
2. Go to http://www.searchtastic.com/ , run a search for those phrases and accounts. Export results to an Excel spread sheet. (Total tweets picked up: 27,506)
3. Create a new sheet. Copy and paste only those Tweets by people that list a location. (Total tweets included: 26,198)
4. Using location information from profiles, try to determine the city, state, country that the person lives in. Example: Melbourne = Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. ChiTown = Chicago, Illinois, United States. Brizzy = Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. 32.38504,-83.647406 = Perry, Georgia, United States. Oz = Australia.

View full map

Methodology: Gillard, Abbot, Brown, Truss

1. On Excel, turn AutoFilter on.
2. Filter the Tweet column to contain one of the following terms: Gillard, Abbot, Brown, Truss
3. Copy and paste the City, State, Country columns to a new worksheet. Select those columns on the new worksheet.
4. Sort data by city. Remove all locations that do not include City information.
5. Go to Advance Filter. Copy the Unique Records to Another Location.
6. Using a COUNTIF formula, count the number of tweets that mentioned the term by city.
7. Go to http://www.batchgeo.com/ and copy paste the city, state, column, count in the box for step 1. Click on the Map Now button.
8. When Geocoder is finished running, select the Show Geocode button, and copy and paste that data to an Excel worksheet. Save each politician’s tweet references on its own CSV file.
9. Go to http://finder.geocommons.com/ and import each csv file. Finish processing each file using latitude and longitude coordinates.

Go to http://maker.geocommons.com/ and create one map for all four politicians. Use visual theme, sizes.

Please note this map is based on total tweets by location. It is not total individuals who tweeted with the selected keyword.

View full map

Methodology: Labor, Liberals, Greens, National Party
This methodology is a repeat of the previous except the names of the politicians are replaced with the names of the parties.

View full map

Methodology: Education, Work Choices, Asylum
This methodology is a repeat of the previous except the keywords are: Education OR Schools, Work Choices OR WorkChoices, Immigrant OR Asylum, NTB or Broadband, Environment OR Global Warming, Health OR Doctor, Afghanistan OR Diggers.

Other: Follows
I’m planning on adding two maps to this post tomorrow. One shows the location of followers for Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard and Bob Brown. The other map will include location of tweets relating to certain issues.

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• World Cup, end of the first round: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Foursquare checkin totals

The first round has ended and we’ve now a fair amount of data for Foursquare and Gowalla. This can be used to try to figure out which fans were most likely to checkin. The top of the table surprised me a bit with who was there and who wasn’t there. The bottom of the table was also a bit surprising. I rather thought that there would be fewer English speaking countries near the bottom and that the Asian and African sides would be over represented. That doesn’t appear to be the case.

Foursquare

Gowalla

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On Foursquare, there were changes near the top and near the bottom of the ladder.  Yesterday featured one swarm badge, which was the same as the day before and the day before that. It will be interesting to see how teams progress into the second and third games. After the first round, will totals probably matter more than averages? What audience is seeing second round games?

Foursquare

Gowalla
Gowalla doesn’t have the checkin strength of Foursquare. A big game on it doesn’t even get to the low count for foursquare and a lot of games have 0s. The ladder is also pretty much completely different.

How different are these two tables? Teams were ranked based on total average checkins. The difference was then calculated and 12 teams had positions that differed by 10 or more places with only two teams sharing the same position.

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Gowalla is the other major geolocation checkin site. I haven’t looked at it since the first day of the World Cup. I need to be a bit more proactive in checking it and updating but the total checkin volume is just so much lower that it is hard to see it as a contender during the cup. (Though, to be fair, Foursquare is falling and when the checkin rate has a difference of 18, that’s not many people.)

I’ve completed a table comparing the total and average checkins on Gowalla for all World Cup games to date. The rankings are rather different than for that of the Foursquare. I’d love speculation as to why.

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• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
• World Cup, day 7: Foursquare checkin totals
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• World Cup, day 5: Foursquare checkin totals

The second round seems to have a lot fewer checkins than the first.  Examples?  South Africa and Mexico’s first game had 335 checkins.  South Afraica’s second game had 36.  Mexico’s second game had 14 checkins. Nigeria’s first game had 203 checkins.  The second game had 19.  What exactly is going on?  Can anyone explain why there are no second round swarm badges?  Is there a different audience attending these games that is less likely to use Foursquare?

Table is sorted by average checkins as that seems to better reflect what is going on. There are a number of changes from yesterday in ranking.

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• World Cup, day 6: Foursquare checkin totals
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We’ve got two games for two teams and the rankings have begun to change. As this World Cup goes on, it looks like fewer people are checking in…

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• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
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This is an update for matches played on June 15.  No new games with 100+ checkins.

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• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
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As the raw data set is getting quite big, I’m not going to include it in future posts. If you’re interested in seeing it, drop me an e-mail and I’ll happily send it along. Of the three games played on June 14, none of them cracked the top four positions in the leaderboard.

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• World Cup, day 8: Foursquare and gowalla checkin totals
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It is day three and the trend appears to be fewer Foursquare checkins. It is interesting to speculate why. The six teams at the bottom of the checkin ladder all played in games with one European side. Two of those matches were against African sides and one was against Asian side. Those six teams failed to earn their supporters a swarm badge. Is Foursquare less popular in Europe than it is in English speaking countries? Do football fans from those countries use other geolocation sites? Let me know.

Ladder Table

Data Table

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I arrived in Australia last week after having applied to and gotten accepted to University of Canberra.  This acceptance was mid-term, starting whenever I arrived.  There wasn’t orientation and I sort of had to do it by feel, but the people at the university were super helpful and nice and made things as painless as possible.  (Ditto for the people at the mobile phone place, the bank and the post office.)  This is based on my experiences so far and may not work for you.    For anyone else going to Australia to do a research degree, I figured I’d let you know some things I’ve learned at this waaaay early stage:

• If you have a Masters by coursework, make sure you can give some sort of equivalent to another Australian degree (or British or Canadian or anywhere else where they have degrees by coursework and degrees by research).  Evaluating my existing Masters caused a hold up in my application as they did not know what to make of it.
• Check your baggage limits.  United gave me two 50 pound bags under the plane.  That’s it.  Go over and it costs you $200.  An extra bag costs you $200.  I’d advise to go heavy on the clothes, shampoo and books as clothes here feel more expensive than the US and a paperback book runs between $12 and $20 AUD.  A cheap laptop in the US can run you $400 but the cheapest I’ve found here is about $550.  (Nicer but still a much higher price point if you’re on a budget.)
• Get a hold of the admissions office and research office as soon as you get your acceptance so you can get your CoE, which you need for your student visa.  As US loans applied through via FAFSA don’t pay out until you get there, this can be a major catch 22 as they want payment upfront before you’re accepted.  To get around this, I faxed them my completed FAFSA paperwork, which showed I was eligible for US based aid and to what dollar amount, FAFSA paperwork that had already theoretically been sent to them when I applied.  They then sent me my CoE and after I completed the student visa form, I had it in two days.
• Before you leave, get a hold of your supervisor (mine was awesome at helping move my application along after it got briefly stuck), tell them when you will arrive and set a time to meet.  You’ll need to do this to set a time up to do your plan for your degree.  This plan will need to eventually get on file with the research department not long after you start.
• One of the absolute first things to do when you get on campus is to get your student ID card.  This ID will help you things like getting a cell phone, opening a bank account and getting a post office box.   For UC, it also doubles as your library card and contains the number for your health insurance login.
• After you get an ID card, set up an appointment with an International Student Advisor.  If you’re entering mid-semester, this is the way to get an orientation packet, get a list of things you need to do, information on who you should contact next, where resources are located or ideas on where to get a bike.
• Find the research department.  They will have additional paperwork for you to fill out.  They’ll also want a copy of your passport and possibly some other stuff as part the student visa work on their side.  If there is a mailing list for research students, make sure you get on it.  The one for UC has scholarship notifications, social gathering announcements, training session information, etc.
• Go through your orientation packet and read it to see what it says.  It should say things like setting up e-mail, checking to make sure your research modules are signed up for, etc.  My packet was geared for undergrads so some of this was confusing.  If you don’t understand everything in the packet and you think you should, ask for help.  At UC, everyone has been beyond nice and helpful and accommodating.
• When you first meet with your supervisor, find out about the library and if there is some one in the library that research students in your department work with.  If there is, schedule an appointment with them.  At mine, I learned all the major databases, how to get access to them, how many days I can check out books, how I can get access to resources not provided inside the library already, signed up for a SCOPUS training session and checked out books related to doing a degree by research in Australia.
• Get an Australian bank account.  This will give you a proof of address, which will be necessary for other things like a cell phone.  You don’t need to prove where you live, just tell them your address.  (I went with WestPac as my bank as I can take out money free from Bank of America there and easily transfer funds.  It just seemed easier.  There is a bank on campus here, that is advertised in the International Student Orientation packet.)  Bring your passport with you and proof that you have a student visa.  I printed out my online confirmation and that worked.  There are no overdraft fees here, or at least WestPac doesn’t have them.  (I boggled.)
• Health insurance is a requirement of your student visa: You need it.  US aid won’t pay out right away.  When you get to campus, you’ll need to find the person in charge of this and see about buying at least 3 months worth of health coverage until your US aid kicks in.  I think that is around $130 AUD.  Could be a bit less.  If your US aid kicks in pro-actively for health coverage from when you started, the amount you paid out of pocket will be refunded to you.  You just need to fill out paperwork.
• You can get a pre-paid or post paid plan.  If you’re going with a plan, you need to have a copy of your student visa, your passport, a credit card, and proof of your address.  Cell phone plans are generally two years so they need proof that you’ll be in the country that long.  You don’t pay your cell phone bill until well, you get the first bill.  (This confused me.  I walked out of the store with a phone that worked but I hadn’t paid the shop anything.) You can pay in the store or online.  Data plans feel pretty affordable. I’m getting a fair amount of minutes, 500 MB transfer, free facebook, twitter and YouTube for around $49 AUD a month for an iPhone.  I’m paying the iPhone up front for $280 AUD instead of tacking on cost of it for each month.
• Post office boxes are handy to have for things like cell phone bills, bank statements, for the university keeping in touch with you and getting absentee ballots from the US.  Mine cost around $87 AUD for 11 months.
• Don’t buy a new bike if you’re looking for one.  Ask around to see who has them.  I got a used one from my supervisor for $30 AUD, cheaper than my bike helmet at $37 AUD.  (Bike helmets are required by law here.)

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