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New Publications on Blogs and Twitter

A couple more new publications before I head off overseas again (mainly for research workshops, but I’ll also take in the Digital Humanities conference in Hamburg and the Conference on Science and the Internet in Düsseldorf):

Tim Highfield and Axel Bruns. “Confrontation and Cooptation: A Brief History of Australian Political Blogs.Media International Australia 143 (2012): 89-98.

This article in a special issue of Media International Australia on the history of the Internet in Australia, edited by Gerard Goggin and Jock Given, reviews the development of the Australian political blogosphere, from the earlier ‘blog wars’ especially around the 2007 election to the increasing incorporation of leading blogs and bloggers into mainstream media stables.

Stephen Harrington, Tim Highfield and Axel Bruns. “More than a Backchannel: Twitter and Television.” In José Manuel Noguera, ed., Audience Interactivity and Participation. Brussels: COST Action Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies, 2012. 13-17.

A very brief introduction to our current thinking on the role of Twitter in relation to television. We outline a number of dimensions to this relationship, and point to key areas for further research and development.

Patterns of Talk on Twitter during the Queensland Floods (Talk about Disasters 2012)

Talk about Disasters 2012

Patterns of Talk on Twitter during the Queensland Floods

Frances Shaw, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns

  • 25 June 2012 – Talk about Disasters workshop, Griffith University, Brisbane

New Work on the Australian Twittersphere, and on Produsage

Phew – it’s been a busy month since my last update. Here’s a run-down of the latest news. First, the emerging maps of the Australian Twittersphere which I presented at the Digital Humanities Australasia conference in Canberra in March have received quite a bit of press coverage over the past week or so, following our press release about this work. Here are some of the highlights:

  • The Australian ran a big page three article about our research, and reprinted the annotated map itself;
  • the Australian Financial Review also printed the map on page three;
  • Stilgherrian gave us a great write-up in Crikey;
  • news.com.au Websites and newspapers also ran a syndicated story about the map;
  • industry sites B&T and Startupsmart pointed out the commercial uses of this enhanced understanding of the Australian Twittersphere;
  • and even science site Phys.org covered our work.

I’ve also done about a dozen radio interviews about this research (which isn’t easy, considering how visual this work is); will post up some links to recordings if they become available. More information about this work is also available on the (newly refurbished) Mapping Online Publics Website, of course.

A Call to Action on Social Media Archiving (and More)

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:

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