The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Sky Croeser, co-presenting with the very busy Tim Highfield. Her focus is on Occupy Oakland, a subset of the overall Occupy movement, and its use of the #oo Twitter hashtag. Occupy Oakland is shaped by the radical history of Oakland – the Black Panthers emerged here, and there have been more recent public protests in the city as well.

The next session at AoIR 2012 starts with a paper by my colleague Tim Highfield that Stephen Harrington and I contributed to as well – he's focussing on Australian politics on Twitter. (Slides and audio to follow.) Here are the slides and audio; my notes on the presentation are below.

Finally, we move on to Andra Siibak in this AoIR 2012 panel. She highlights the potential of creative research methods for the study of social media: here, participants are asked to create something symbolic or metaphorical to represent their responses to research questions, and to reflect on these creations. Andra has used this to examine the online identity construction strategies of tweens in Estonia and Sweden.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2012 panel is Niels Brügger, who steps back from online social networks to present some more general observations about network analysis. His specific interest is in Web historiography – how can network analysis be applied to archival Web material, then?

The next speaker on this AoIR 2012 panel is Frauke Zeller, who continues the focus on mixed-methods approaches to online social network analysis. This methodological paradigm is still quite new, and there is considerable uncertainty about best practices in research; network analysis alone cannot be enough.

The final session at AoIR 2012 this evening is a panel on online social network analysis. Jakob Linaa Jensen starts us off by reflecting on the methods for studying online social networks, and notes the importance of both tracking social media use in practice and asking users about their uses.

The final speaker in this panel at AoIR 2012 is Delia Dumitrica, whose interest is in how citizens conceptualise the use of social media in political communication. Her premise is that this can be understood as an attempt to discursively articulate wider issues of trust in politicians.

The second presenter in this session at AoIR 2012 is Sander Schwartz, who shifts our attention to the use of social media during the 2011 Danish election. His project drew on a panel of 6,000 volunteers whose Internet use was monitored, as well as on a survey of some 2,000 respondents from this group. The panel was representative of the wider Danish population; the survey group was self-selecting.

The next session at AoIR 2012 begins with a paper presented by Julian Ausserhofer and Axel Maireder about national politics on Twitter, in the case of Austria. Twitter is now being used by a range of political actors in the country, including journalists and politicians, who are at times publicly interacting with one another using the platform. Many users also link to news media materials, of course.