Mapping Online Publics

We’ve got a few busy years ahead of us, it seems. In addition to the ARC Linkage project on social media and crisis communication which was awarded to us (the QUT Mapping Online Publics team along with our CCI colleague Kate Crawford, the Queensland Department of Community Safety, and the Eidos Institute), which we’ll carry out during 2012-14, we’ve also had word in December that another project application has been successful.

Titled “The Impact of Social Media on Agenda-Setting in Election Campaigns:
Cross-Media and Cross-National Comparisons”, that project will study the use of social media in a series of election campaigns which are coming up over the next few years (2012-15) – including the Queensland state election and the US presidential election this year (and I’m tempted to throw in the French presidential election as well, just for fun), and elections in Sweden, Norway, and Australia which are coming up in 2013 and 2014.

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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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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.

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.

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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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Following on from the “World According to Twitter” research workshop at QUT, today we presented our research methods at a pre-conference workshop at Communities & Technologies 2011. This was probably the most extensive presentation of our work on Twitter research to date – including a live demonstration of how to work with basic yourTwapperkeeper datasets.

Below are the two presentations I made during the day, with audio attached. Obviously, some of the audio commentary refers to the live demonstrations, which we didn’t capture – but I hope it’s useful nonetheless.

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Well, getting stuck in Melbourne for a day and being unable to participate in day one of our ATN-DAAD workshop with Cornelius Puschmann and Katrin Weller from the University of Düsseldorf has at least enabled me to put the finishing touches on something I’ve been meaning to do for some time: to collect and share the various Gawk scripts for processing Twitter data collected by Twapperkeeper or our modified yourTwapperkeeper. A ZIP file of all our (half-way decent) scripts is now available on the Tools section of our site.

These scripts enable the processing of comma- or tab-separated value files containing tweets related to specific hashtags or keywords, as Twapperkeeper used to produce them, and as yourTwapperkeeper does once you’ve installed the modified export functions which I shared in a previous post.

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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.

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