Sorry: it’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog. Largely, that’s because I’ve been so busy with our work on the Mapping Online Publics project – see the project blog for all the latest information. Following the various natural disasters we’ve endured – in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, to begin with –, that work has focussed for the moment especially on the use of social media for crisis communication, with plenty of outcomes already. In particular, this includes our two most recent presentations:

• “Social Media Use in the Queensland Floods”, at the Eidos symposium in Brisbane on 4 April 2011
• “Tracking Crises on Twitter: Analysing #qldfloods and #eqnz”, at the Emergency Media and Public Affairs conference in Canberra on 12 April 2011

Slides and audio from both presentations are now online here – just follow the links above.

As 2010 draws to a close, its perhaps appropriate that my last couple of conference presentations for the year take a somewhat retrospective nature, summarising and reflecting on the 2010 Australian federal election, with a particular view on what we’ve learned about the state of Australian journalism in general and the role of Twitter in election coverage and debate in particular. I’ll present both those papers at different conferences in Sydney this Friday (26 November):

• At the Journalism Education Association conference at the University of Technology Sydney, I’m presenting a somewhat polemical plenary, “The Blogification of Australian Journalism? Notes from the Election”, in the morning (and there’s a full paper to go with the presentation, too);
• at the International Australian Studies Association ‘Double Vision’ conference at the University of Sydney, in the afternoon, I’m presenting “Election 2010: The View from Twitter”, a ‘best of’ from our detailed examination of the #ausvotes Twitter hashtag as part of the Mapping Online Publics ARC Discovery project.

Slides for both those presentations are below, and I’ll try and add audio later both with audio.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker in our social media mapping panel at AoIR 2010 is Hallvard Moe, whose focus is on Twitter as an arena for public debate in Norway, around the data retention policy debate in that country. Norway is traditionally a social-democratic state with relatively advanced use of ICTs, apparently including some 160,000 Twitter users; this also meant that there was substantial debate about the adoption of the EU data retention directive (for regularly archiving phone and network data).

Hallvard archived tweets on the #dld hashtag using Twapperkeeper, between April and early August 2010, resulting in some 12,000 tweets (though not all relevant tweets in Norway may have used the #dld hashtag, of course). Activity on the topic was spread across the entire time period, at relatively low but persistent levels. There are a number of key peaks, especially around 9 May (the conservative party’s congress); tweets around that day anticipated party decisions as well as commenting on the day’s events.

Gothenburg.
My own paper (with Jean Burgess, Thomas Nicolai, and Lars Kirchhoff) starts the final session of this second day at AoIR 2010. Below is the Powerpoint, and I’ll try to add the audio some time soon the audio is online now, too.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker at AoIR 2010 is Theo Plothe, whose interest is in the use of Twitter by NFL players in the US. The NFL is the most popular league in the US, and players are increasingly participating in it – presumably also encouraged by their employers. NBA player Charlie Villanueva, in fact, was reprimanded for tweeting during a basketball game. NFL players have also been fined, suspended, and fired for tweeting inappropriate comments – and in fact, player Ocho Cinco even orchestrated a post-touchdown celebration with fans via Twitter.

Gothenburg.
The next AoIR 2010 speaker is David Houghton, whose interest is also in Twitter. He starts by pointing to a range of tweets of varying degrees of mundaneness and secrecy, and is interested in examining linguistic differences in them. What threats to personal privacy result from the spread of gossip? How can levels of self-disclosure be measured – in breadth or depth, for example – in order to alert users to when they might be compromising themselves by oversharing?

How do we enable users to go about sharing while protecting their concerns and informing them about potential harms? David collected 250 random tweets from both Twitter and Secret Tweet (which collects tweets with sensitive information, it seems).