Mapping Online Publics

It’s difficult to believe that one year ago, significant parts of Brisbane were inundated by floodwaters; thankfully, there has been no repeat of the flood crisis this year. One of the few good news stories to emerge from the disaster was the – overall, very successful – way in which social media such as Twitter and Facebook were used during the event, both by key emergency authorities and by everyday users, from directly affected local residents to onlookers further afield.

Particular kudos in this must go to the Queensland Police Service Media Unit, which – not quite from a standing start, but certainly without much time to prepare a comprehensive strategy for its social media crisis communication approaches – delivered timely, informative, and level-headed updates on the flood crisis as it unfolded. Its Facebook followers grew, literally overnight, by a factor of ten, and @QPSMedia also became the single most visible account participating in the #qldfloods Twitter hashtag.

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As 2011 winds down (which may also give me the time to do some more Gawk coding again – watch out for more updates soon), we’re still in the process of harvesting the results of our work over the last twelve months. Over the past few weeks, a clutch of articles based on our Mapping Online Publics research have finally seen the light of day:

• I’ve converted my exploration of dynamic @reply network mapping methods (detailed in a series of blog posts starting here) into an article in Information, Communication & Society: “How Long Is a Tweet? Mapping Dynamic Conversation Networks on Twitter Using Gawk and Gephi.” In the article as well as in the original blog posts, I’m using the 2010 Rudd/Gillard Australian Labor Party leadership spill – #spill on Twitter – as a case study.
   

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OK, it’s taken a little while, but we’ve now finally put all the presentations from our panel on social media and crisis communication at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Seattle in October online. Three of the four have audio as well – my apologies to our last presenter, Anders Larsson, but the batteries on my audio recorder ran out just as he got started!

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(Crossposted from snurb.info. Longer post there.)

Briefly back in Australia, yesterday I went down to Sydney to speak at the Australian Society of Archivists’ 2011 Symposium (staged at the fabulous Luna Park venue). My paper was meant as an urgent call to action on the question of archiving public activities in social media spaces – so much material which will be of immense value to future researchers is being lost every day if we don’t get our act together very soon; we can’t wait for the lumbering beast that is the U.S. Library of Congress to do the job for us, however fulsomely they’ve promised to archive the full public Twitter firehose. The truth is, here in Australia we already have the technologies for capturing and archiving large datasets of public communication on Twitter and elsewhere – but someone with the necessary public standing and archivist expertise (the National Library, the National Archives, …) must now take the initiative; the sooner, the better.

My paper (with audio) is below:

I was briefly in Perth on Friday, to present our research into the use of Twitter for crisis communication during recent natural disasters at the RightClick 2011 event organised by the Institute for Public Administration Australia. A stimulating day with some very interesting speakers – many thanks to the organisers for the invitation!

Below are my slides, with audio. The next stops for Jean and me will be Taipei (where we’re participating in a crisis communication workshop with our colleagues from National Cheng Chi University) and Seattle (for the 2011 Association of Internet Researchers conference). More from those events soon…

It’s been a busy few days: last week, Jean, Stephen and I participated in the magnificent Düsseldorf Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Twitter Analysis (DIATA11), which our colleagues and collaboration partners from the University of Düsseldorf organised – it featured a veritable who’s who of Twitter and social media researchers from Europe and beyond. Stephen has already posted the slides and audio for his own talk here, and belatedly, I’m now following suit with our joint keynote from the event (audio also included). The Düsseldorfers have also set up a Slideshare group for the event, and are currently compiling a collection of all the presentations – keep an eye on it, there’s some excellent work there!

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[crossposted at my own blog creativity/machine.]

On the 1st and 2nd of September I was in London at the third Transforming Audiences conference, hosted by CAMRI at the University of Westminster. I was one of four keynote presenters – alongside Nancy Baym, Patricia Lange, and Adriana de Souza e Silva. I had a great time, and I’m very grateful to David Gauntlett and the other conference organisers for inviting me. The keynotes were all video-recorded, and I’ll post the video of mine here once it becomes available. In the meantime, here are my abstract and a copy of the slides (mostly pictures, as is my practice when giving these kinds of talks).

From ‘Broadcast Yourself’ to ‘Follow Your Interests’: Social media five years on

When YouTube started to become popular in 2006, it had little functionality beyond the uploading and sharing of videos, and the invocation to ‘broadcast yourself’. Around the same time, Twitter first invited users to share everyday updates with friends and colleagues in response to the simple question ‘What are you doing?’. In 2011, YouTube is a central player in the contemporary media ecology, extending well beyond amateur videosharing; and Twitter plays an increasingly central role in the origination and dissemination of real-time news, largely as a result of social, cultural and technological innovations originally introduced by the user community. At the same time, the ongoing commercial evolution of these and other ‘social media’ platforms has gradually repositioned us – as ‘users’ – in new ways. In this presentation I trace some common trajectories across several social media platforms, and discuss their consequences for the future of participatory culture.

Cardiff.
Another week, another presentation: Jean, Stephen, and I have now made it to Cardiff, where we’re participating in the Future of Journalism conference. Today, we presented our paper on Twitter research methods for journalists and journalism researchers, which offers a quick overview of our major ways of studying Twitter (and Twitter hashtags in particular). Our slides and audio from the presentation are below – the full paper is also online. For my liveblogging from the conference, check the Future of Journalism posts on snurb.info – and there’s also the #foj11 hashtag, of course.

Amsterdam.
After the ECPR conference in Reykjavík, I’ve been lucky enough to spend a week in Amsterdam, where I was invited to present a guest lecture as part of the festive opening of the University of Amsterdam’s ‘new media season’: the official welcoming of the 2011/12 cohort of students in the MA in New Media. My talk presented an overview of our work in Mapping Online Publics so far, with special attention to our work on Twitter. In particular, I spoke about the role of Twitter during the Queensland floods and other crises, as well as our recent breakthroughs in identifying different tweeting activities taking place in the context of different hashtags.

Below are my slides for the talk, with audio (unfortunately I placed my voice recorder in front of the laptop exhaust fan, resulting in a very noisy recording that needed substantial noise reduction, so the audio quality is somewhat below par…). My sincere thanks to Richard Rogers for the invitation to speak to the MA students – looks like a very exciting course.

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Jean and I are currently at the European Consortium for Political Research conference in Reykjavík, where we’ve presented a paper about hashtags today. Below is our presentation (with audio), which also includes some new hashtag metrics we cooked up during our week-long workshop with our ATN-DAAD project partners at the University of Münster last week. More on this soon! The full paper is also online.