Using large datasets to study online publics

Abstract

The English word ‘public’, and its parallel terms in other European traditions such as the German ‘Öffentlichkeit’ or the French ‘publique’, deal with a hugely important idea – how does society share its most important ideas. If you understand the public, you understand much about the private as well, you understand how politics is done, how power is legitimated. It is one of the most important social imaginaries, to use Taylor’s (2004) phrase, a collective understanding that can be used by people in a society to make sense of social existence. That imaginary has always been an awkward object, difficult to define, and the contemporary public is still more difficult as communication modes become more globalised, fragmented and interactive. What do we mean by this term today? This paper explores the potential of large scale data analysis to help bring this troublesome idea into focus.