AoIR 2012

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.

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Jenny Korn, whose focus is on the #FuckProp8 hashtag which emerged around the Californian referendum to ban gay marriage, known as Proposition 8. The success of this referendum was a surprise to many Californians themselves, and resulted in a substantial amount of pushback, in the form of the hashtag (and its alternative #rejectprop8).

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Emilie Lucchesi, whose focus is on a controversy around southern US style TV chef Paula Deen. Deen announced in January that she had diabetes, and will be a spokesperson for a diabetic drug. Even while she knew about her condition she continued to cook very butter-heavy cuisine, however. (More than 100 million Americans now have diabetes or are prediabetic.)

The next session at AoIR 2012 starts with Catherine Knight Steele, whose focus is on the online expression of grief following the death of Whitney Houston. Many of the messages being posted following her death seemed more like the support offered to family members than a public expression of fandom. The same was not true in the same way following the death of Michael Jackson, when many more critical responses were aired.

The final presenters in this AoIR 2012 session are Camila Monteiro, Raquel Recuero, and Adriana Amaral, who begin by noting the demographics of Twitter in Brazil: there are some 33 million Brazilian Twitter users, most of whom are adolescents. Their interest in this paper is especially in fandom and anti-fandom around the pop band Restart, and in the social capital which such activities create and maintain.

Next up at AoIR 2012 it's Tim Highfield and me again, presenting a paper co-authored with our colleague Stephen Harrington. Here are the slides; audio to follow. and audio.

#Eurovision: Twitter as a Technology of Fandom from Axel Bruns

My colleagues and I have a paper in the next session at AoIR 2012, too, but we start with Rachel Magee, whose interest is in fandom on Twitter around the recent movie The Hunger Games. She and her colleagues developed the Twitter Zombie system, which draws on the Twitter search API to track user and hashtag activity around he movie. The movie is based on a popular novel for teen audiences, and the film itself was also very successful, with substantial fan activities around it.

The second speaker in this AoIR 2012 session is Lucy Morieson, whose focus is also on Australian online news – in particular, on the Websites of The Age, Crikey, and The Conversation. This also plays out against the changing business and professional environments for Australian journalism, of course.

The first AoIR 2012 session this Saturday starts with my paper with my colleagues Tim Highfield and Stephen Harrington, which presents our work on the Australian Twitter New Index (ATNIX). Below are the slides – for more, also see my column at The Conversation. Audio to follow soon! I've added the audio now, too.

Sharing the News: Dissemination of Links to Australian News Sites on Twitter from Axel Bruns