Case Study: QUT Digital Observatory achieves scalable social media insights with Looker

Queensland University of Technology Digital Observatory Studying social media, music, and streaming behavior

QUT Digital Observatory, based at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, needed a scalable analytics warehouse to capture and analyze fast-growing social media and media consumption data across platforms. Working with Looker-related reporting and visualization tools alongside Google BigQuery, the team sought to manage billions of tweets, news links, and other digital platform data for long-term public communication research.

Looker helped QUT Digital Observatory by enabling dashboards and integrated reporting on top of its BigQuery data, supporting analysis of social activity, news sharing, and platform trends. The solution helped the team identify 500,000 meaningfully active Twitter accounts from 3.7 million Australian accounts, manage a live dataset of 2.4 billion tweets growing by about 1.3 million per day, and deliver insights for projects with industry and government partners, including natural disaster communication and news-source analysis.

QUT Digital Observatory

Axel Bruns

Creative Industries Faculty