As many know, I’ve been archiving Springsteen-related tweets for some time now (to date total archived tweets containing the word “springsteen”: 2,212,370—watch for some news on these tweets in a month or so). During the 2013 European leg of the tour, the Springsteen community started assigning hashtags for each of the locations as a way to help fans first learn the role call times and locations and, second, to help organize the tweets themselves. I’m going to begin anaylzing many of these in the coming months in preparation for a special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures on European Fans and European Fan Objects: Localization and Translation.
In the meantime, I thought I’d share the data for the tweets and link to pages where you can search them if you’d like. Note that I wasn’t able to capture tweets for all the shows on the European leg. Not all shows had individual hashtags and if they did I might have missed on. Some, like Rome and Geneva, had two hashtags, and I have listed both. The are in order by concert date. I’ve also included the briefly-live #tourend hashtag, which I thought might catch on but didn’t.
- June 18: #bruceglasgow: 313
- June 20: #brucecoventry: 393
- June 26: #brucegijon: 6292 <– (the most tweets for any concert on the whole Wrecking Ball tour)
- June 29: #bruceparis:1454
- June 30: #bruceHRC: 139
- June 30: #brucelondon: 123
- July 3: #brucegeneva: 186
- July 3: #brucegeneve: 236
- July 7: #bruceleipzig: 573
- July 11: #brucerome: 129
- July 11: #bruceroma: 2625
- July 13: #brucewerchter: 371
- July 16: #brucelimerick: 1124
- July 18: #brucecork: 1389
- July 20: #brucebelfast: 1322
- July 24: #bruceleeds: 2450
- July 23: #brucecardiff: 898
- July 27 and 28: #brucekilkenny (both shows): 2224
- #tourend: 31
Archiving hashtags allows one to see intricate relationships among those who are tweeting. For example, if we look at a visualization of the hashtag #bruceinoz, which has 326 tweets, we can make some assumptions about how people are tweeting:
We can see who was tweeting the most and who was referencing whom in their tweets (lines don’t mean direct communication, only that there was an @reference in a tweet). We can also see that most people who were using the tweet weren’t actually engaging in direct conversation with anyone. Rather, they were tweeting the hashtag for one reason or another. One of the goals of my study, which will be obtained via interviews, is exactly why people are tweeting the way they do.
springsteenfansandtwitter.wordpress.com 