Mapping Online Publics

It’s that time of the year again: we are now calling for expressions of interest from prospective students interested in doing their PhD research with us in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia.

Regular readers of this blog will have a pretty good idea of the range of topics we’re interested in, but here’s a quick overview anyway:

• Social media analytics: we’re interested in any projects exploring the use of social media from mixed-methods qualitative and quantitative perspectives. Students interested in this work should have a background in media, communication, or cultural studies and/or social sciences, computer sciences, and informatics; we particularly invite students who are able to engage in further methodological development either by building on the work we’ve already done in this field or by developing new tools and methods using different approaches and technologies. Also, while our primary focus in recent research has been on Twitter and blogs, this does not mean that other social media spaces are out of bounds for your work.

Read the rest of this entry →

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you’ll have seen some of the work on the use of Twitter in the Australian election that we’ve started to do. That’s part of our wider research into mapping Australian online publics which will examine interactions across blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr well beyond the immediately political realm, which we’re undertaking as part of an ARC Discovery project, and in the context of our work researching our changing media ecologies in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), based in Brisbane, Australia.

To further extend this work, we’re now calling for expressions of interests in postgraduate research within the CCI. Within the CCI, there’s a very broad range of research opportunities, and we encourage you to have a look through all of them, even if network mapping isn’t your specific interest – undertaking your PhD at the CCI means you will be working with world class researchers who can offer supervision of the highest standards. Our research activities cover a broad range of emerging issues, themes and projects across the entertainment and creative industries including innovation and policy development; significant project collaborations with Asia; a major project looking at broadband services; mapping the creative industries; IP law; a global cultural futures study and other projects which engage community and industry partners in creative industries from major film studios to the Salvation Army and ‘at-risk’ young people working as media co-creators. visit the CCI Projects Page at http://www.cci.edu.au/projects to find out more about the Centre’s activities.

Read the rest of this entry →