The next speaker at the CCC Symposium is Casper Radil, whose interest is in the analytical construction of Web data. How might we talk about the relationship between server access data and the actual communication processes which take place as users engage with the Websites themselves? Casper's approach is digital space analysis, which is an approach to contextualising the different forms of metadata which are created as users access Web content.

The next speaker at the CCC symposium is the fabulous Nancy Baym, who begins by noting how overwhelming the buzz about 'big data' has become. There's a great deal of fascination just with the things we can do with big data sources - tracing interesting patterns, attempting to predict future processes, making sense of data by using algorithmic tools.

I'm spending the day at the Centre for Communication and Computing at the University of Copenhagen, where Klaus Bruhn Jensen has brought together a bunch of AoIR folks, including myself, for a one-day symposium called "Digital Data - Lost, Found and Made". I'll be speaking about our Twitter research in the afternoon.

I’m about to head back to Australia after a month of travel in Europe (mainly in Germany), where my colleagues and I have engaged in a range of workshops and conferences with our various research partners. Here’s an overview of the major presentations during that time.

In Bristol, I was an invited speaker at the first workshop of a new network of researchers exploring digital methods, and presented our work in the Mapping Online Publics project:

Axel Bruns. "Mapping Online Publics: Understanding the Role of Twitter in Public Communication." Invited plenary paper presented at the first NCRM Digital Methods as Mainstream Methodology workshop, University of the West of England, Bristol, 9 July 2012.

From there I travelled to Munich, to participate in a workshop on methodological innovation in Internet research at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität:

I’m barely back from my trip to Austria for CeDEM and my Twitter research methods seminar at the University of Vienna, as well as my public talk for Quintessenz and the Internet Research Group at the University – but today I also presented a brief talk on using social media in corporate communication at the Cooperative Research Centres Association conference here in Brisbane. CRCs are one key form of government-supported research centre in Australia – and the CRCA is the peak body coordinating and representing their activities.

Krems.
And here’s the second part of the five-minute lightning talks which conclude this CeDEM 2011 conference, which starts with Mark Thamm. He presents a case study of online debate about nuclear power which was facilitated and tracked by the WeGov group through established social networking platforms; this involves kicking off new discussion topics as well as tracking contributions to existing topics. WeGov staff also respond to existing posts from the general public to create further discussion. This process enables policymakers to engage with such debate through an intermediary service.

Next up is Andras Szabo, whose interest is in social news and bookmarking Websites like Reddit, Digg, and Newsvine. These sites generate compilations of news reports from professional media and other sources, levelling the playing field between mainstream and alternative news organisations; they create strong public places, and enable meaningful participation.

Krems.
The final session at CeDEM 2011 is a series of five-minute lightning talks – so I’ll try to cover them all in two combined blog posts. Let’s see how we go…

The first speaker is Siobhan Donaghy, whose interest is in the transparency of electronic vote counting: after voting (using traditionally paper ballots and ballot boxes) has taken place, how are the results dealt with? Can technological solutions improve the counting process – and how can we keep the counting process transparent even though counting is no longer manual?

Krems.
The final keynote speaker at CeDEM 2011 is Stefan Gehrke, whose focus is on open data. He notes that open data was a niche term at first, but turned more mainstream after President Obama launched the opendata.gov initiative – as a result, the increased availability of public sector information (PSI) initiated a change from from a permissions culture (where data access must be requested) to an innovations culture (where access is the default setting, and no permissions are necessary for the development of new services using these data).

PSI puts citizens into focus and highlights the importance of government-to-citizen interaction between elections. This increases the focus on citizens’ needs, and the potential at a local government level is especially high. But in spite of all of this, the digital civic rights movement has been faster than government in harnessing open data; they have developed projects showcasing the potential of open data, if not always with the support of government.