The final speakers in this Digital Methods panel are Jürgen Grimm and Christiane Grill. They're interested in moving beyond the analysis of individual tweets to the aggregation of Twitter data which can be used reliably in media research. This requires the use of transparent and clear search or tracking strategies, and a further manual reduction of the data to weed out irrelevant material; further, the intertextual connections of tweets need to be identified and examined, both between each other and with external texts (e.g. from mass media).

The idea in this is to move from an atomistic Twitter universe, based on individual tweets, to a conversational and/or intermedial Twitter universe (variously recognising tweet relationships through @mentions and retweets, or through links and other pointers to external media texts). In the context of the Salzburg state election in Austria, for example, the former means focussing on conversations rather than individual tweets; the latter means identifying all links being shared by Twitter users and generating a hybrid network including tweets and other resources.

The second speaker this morning at Digital Methods is Andreas Jungherr, who shifts our focus back to Twitter: he is interested in how we may use observations from this platform to understand what happens in society as such. What, if anything, may we read out of, for example, the patterns around an election which could help us predict the outcome of the election?

In the German election 2009, for example, Andreas found substantial activity around the Pirate Party, but this is an artefact of the specific demographics of Twitter in the country at the time rather than a sign of genuine pandemic interest in the party. In the same campaign, the volume of political news being shared during the campaign clearly shows the gradual growth of interest ahead of Election Day, and pinpoints key moments like debates and state elections in the run-up.

The second day at Digital Methods in Vienna starts with a speed panel which begins with a paper by Philip Sinner on the German Bundesliga's social media activities. Football is a popular and everyday culture phenomenon in Germany, and has an important place in people's lives; the clubs themselves do professional PR work, of course, but have yet to fully embrace social media as part of this work. How successful is this in managing identities, relationships, and information to date? What are they trying to do? Which social media platforms are they using?

Philip examined the various social media offerings and spoke to the media directors of various Bundesliga clubs, as well as reviewing the content of their social media activities. He first went to the home pages of the clubs, to identify which social media platforms are being linked to from these pages - but not all of their social media activities (especially for the international market, e.g. Bayern Munich's Weibo accounts) are linked to from these pages. Of course there are also various fan-operated accounts, which are sometimes difficult to distinguish from official accounts.

The final paper in this Digital Methods panel is by Axel Maireder and Stefan Schlögl, whose interest is in the #aufschrei discussion about sexism in German politics. How did this emerge from a small-scale conversation on Twitter to a major trending hashtag, and subsequently to a cross-media event, over the course of a few hours? What happened here was the growth of a communicative network in the form of a partial public or issue public related to the topic on Twitter, interleaved with other publics as enabled by the conventional mainstream media.

New forms of discussion fora and spaces, especially also including social media, enable new and lasting connections between themes and individuals. These connections are increasingly manifested in the data structures which are available through social media APIs, too, and structure the flow of communication. URLs shared in tweets and other social media updates further document the connection of such communication with other, external media, while hashtags enable the development of ad hoc publics independent of existing follower networks.

The next presentation in this Digital Methods panel is by Christoph Neuberger and Sanja Kapidzic, whose focus is on the question of how to define themes and topics in online communication. Using single keywords to define topics is too simplistic, and there often is an implication that we know what a topic is when we see it - but what exactly is a topic?

Sometimes, specific labels do emerge for given topics, which makes tracking them easier, but these labels themselves may evolve. In live topics it becomes necessary to track these themes and continue to update the markers of themes which are seen as relevant. Themes may be defined variously by broad news beats, by thematic areas, by single themes, or at the most specific level by specific events; these levels of specificity also overlap considerably, however.

The next panel at the Digital Methods conference begins with a panel by Theresa Sauter and me, on the viral distribution of links to the video of Julia Gillard's "misogyny" speech in 2012 as it was posted in full on the ABC News site. Unfortunately the audio recording didn't work out, so below are the slides only - do make sure you click on the links to see the video and the animations of the emerging retweet network.

I am delighted to report the culmination of a very intensive, highly collaborative project: our new book Twitter and Society, edited by Katrin Weller, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, Cornelius Puschmann, and me, was launched at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Denver a few days ago and is now available from Amazon and the Peter Lang Website. I’m very pleased that we managed to get the first copies of the book printed in time for the conference, to be able to hand them to the many of our contributors who were present at AoIR 2013.

The book is a 450-page anthology of the very best of current Twitter research, providing a comprehensive overview of research methods, concepts, challenges, and applications. It features some 31 chapters, a foreword by the University of Amsterdam’s Richard Rogers – and we’re particularly proud to have been able to use the painting Die Zwitschermaschine (The Twittering Machine) by Paul Klee as the book cover. Many, many thanks to our 45 contributors for their fabulous contributions. A full list of chapters is below – and here’s a group photo from the launch at AoIR 2013. You can also follow further updates about the book at @twitsocbook!

After the “Compromised Data” symposium in Toronto I’ve made my way over to Europe, where my first stop is a PhD symposium in Copenhagen where I’ve been invited to present an update on my work on produsage. Here, I’ve revisited the fundamental concept of produsage and made the link to my current work on the uses of social media, especially in a journalistic context. Slides and audio below: