A Round-Up of New Publications

Without in-person conferences to liveblog, this site has been a little quiet recently. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any news to report – so here is the first of a number of posts with updates on recent activities. First of all, I’m very pleased that a number of articles I’ve contributed to have finally been published over the past few months – and in particular, that they represent the results of a range of collaborations with new and old colleagues.

The first of these is a new book chapter led by my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague and former PhD student Ehsan Dehghan, which provides a useful update on his and our current approach to discourse analysis. Building on Ehsan’s work for his excellent PhD thesis, the book chapter connects a detailed methodological overview with the conceptual approaches of Laclau and Mouffe, exploring the presence of agonistic and antagonistic tendencies across a number of case studies. The chapter was published in the third volume in Rebecca Lind’s Produsing Theory book series, which in its title also draws on my concept of produsage, of course.

Dehghan, Ehsan, Axel Bruns, Peta Mitchell, and Brenda Moon. “Discourse-Analytical Studies on Social Media Platforms: A Data-Driven Mixed-Methods Approach.” Produsing Theory in a Digital World 3.0, ed. Rebecca Ann Lind. New York: Peter Lang, 2020. 159–77. DOI:10.3726/b13192/20.

A second new article results from another collaboration with a former PhD student, Felix Münch, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg. Building on the work Felix presented at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium in Urbino, this article in Social Media + Society outlines a new approach to mapping the network structure of a national Twittersphere, offering a pathway towards generating some critically important baseline data against which observations from hashtag- and keyword-based studies may be compared.

Münch, Felix Victor, Ben Thies, Cornelius Puschmann, and Axel Bruns. “Walking through Twitter: Sampling a Language-Based Follow Network of Influential Twitter Accounts.” Social Media + Society 7.1, (2021) DOI:10.1177/2056305120984475.

Third, I’m also very pleased to have made a contribution to a new article in Digital Journalism by Magdalena Wischnewski, a visiting PhD scholar supported by the RISE-SMA research network coordinated by Stefan Stieglitz at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Caught up in the travel disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Magdalena spent rather more time with us at the QUT DMRC than we had planned, but happily we were able to put this extra time to good use and investigate the motivations for sharing hyper-partisan content (in this case study, from InfoWars) on Twitter.

Wischnewski, Magdalena, Axel Bruns, and Tobias Keller. “Shareworthiness and Motivated Reasoning in Hyper-Partisan News Sharing Behavior on Twitter.” Digital Journalism, 6 Apr. 2021. DOI:10.1080/21670811.2021.1903960.

The pandemic itself also provided us with further case studies for our research. I’ve previously mentioned our investigation of the spread of conspiracy theories on Facebook that attempted to make a (disproven and entirely nonsensical) connection between COVID-19 and 5G technology. One of the outcomes of our current ARC Discovery project on online mis- and disinformation, this study has now also been published as a journal article in Media International Australia, where it has become one of the most read articles of the past three years. We have some further articles forthcoming that extend this work by exploring the mainstream media coverage of this conspiracy theory, too.

Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, and Eddy Hurcombe. "‘Corona? 5G? Or Both?’: The Dynamics of COVID-19/5G Conspiracy Theories on Facebook." Media International Australia (2020). DOI:10.1177/1329878X20946113.

In addition to our research on this COVID-19 conspiracy theory, my colleague Tim Graham led an investigation into more directly politically motivated pandemic-related propaganda, directed at the Premier of the Australian state of Victoria, Dan Andrews. Studying the battle of pro- and anti-Andrews hashtags on Twitter, we were able to document the severe polarisation between the Premier’s supporters and distractors, and to identify the key tactics especially of anti-Andrews propagandists in trying to push their message into mainstream media circulation. This study, too, was published in Media International Australia.

Timothy Graham, Axel Bruns, Daniel Angus, Edward Hurcombe, and Sam Hames. “#IStandWithDan versus #DictatorDan: The Polarised Dynamics of Twitter Discussions about Victoria’s COVID-19 Restrictions.” Media International Australia 179 (2021): 127-148. DOI:10.1177/1329878X20981780.

Oddly, I’m also a contributor to a third article that recently came out in Media International Australia: this was led by another (pre-pandemic) visitor to the QUT DMRC, Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos. Mathias visited us as a postdoctoral student in the DCLead Erasmus Mundus Joint Master Degree, and in collaboration with my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals and me conducted a series of interviews with Australian data journalists and related newsroom professionals, to understand their use of data analysis and visualisation tools. The result is a study that provides useful insights into the consequences of technology choices in this emerging area of journalistic practice. And Mathias has now moved on to do his PhD at the University of Navarra, Spain.

Mathias Felipe de Lima Santos, Aljosha Karim Schapals, and Axel Bruns. "Out-of-the-Box versus In-House Tools: How Are They Affecting Data Journalism in Australia?" Media International Australia (2020). DOI: 10.1177/1329878X20961569.

Closer to home, I’ve also continued with some longer-term collaborations in the QUT DMRC itself. As an output from our concluding ARC Linkage project with The Conversation and the CRC Association, with my colleagues Jean Burgess and Kim Osman I published an article in Communication Research and Practice that examined the role of The Conversation as a source of scholarly insights during the annual public debate about Australia Day, and whether it should be moved or renamed. Mapping the issue networks related to this topic on Twitter, we found that scholarly views circulated widely on the platform, with The Conversation playing an important role in inserting such contributions into wider public debate.

Jean Burgess, Axel Bruns, and Kim Osman. "Analysing Scholarly Contributions to Public Debate with Social Media Issue Mapping: A Case Study of the Australia Day Controversy." Communication Research and Practice 5.4 (2019): 393-407. DOI:10.1080/22041451.2019.1689688.

Jean also led the work on our contribution to a special issue of African Journalism Studies which emerged from our participation in the inaugural African Digital Methods Symposium held at Rhodes University in Makhanda / Grahamstown, South Africa. For both of us this was a fascinating event which revealed the richness of digital media and journalism research in Africa – work that still doesn’t circulate widely enough in the scholarly literature beyond the continent. Hopefully this special issue can make a contribution to addressing this.

Burgess, Jean, and Axel Bruns. “Digital Methods in Africa and Beyond: A View from Down Under.” African Journalism Studies 41.4 (2020): 16–21. DOI:10.1080/23743670.2020.1865648.

Finally, building on the work in my recent book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, I was also asked to contribute a keyword article on filter bubbles to a special ‘Concepts of the Digital Society’ section of Internet Policy Review, published by the Alexander-von-Humboldt-Institut for Internet and Society in Berlin. The article provides a very brief primer on the key arguments of the book, and can hopefully serve as a useful discussion starter on this topic.

Axel Bruns. “Filter Bubble.” Internet Policy Review 8.4 (2019). DOI:10.14763/2019.4.1426.

And that is it for now, as far as articles are concerned. I’ll post a separate update on new papers and presentations (most of them online, for obvious reasons) some time soon, too!