Last week I posted a round-up of the latest publications from my QUT DMRC colleagues and me, listing nine new journal articles and book chapters from our various research projects – investigating mis- and disinformation sharing (in general, and related to the COVID-19 pandemic), analysing the dynamics of polarised online discourses, debunking the idea of echo chambers and filter bubbles, mapping social networks, and examining the evolution of journalistic practices.

This week, I’ll do the same for some of my and our recent presentations. As opportunities for in-person events remain very limited under the current circumstances, most of these have been online – but one small benefit from this is that more of them take the form of recorded videos rather than slides only. Here’s the research we’ve talked about recently, then – click on the various links below to see the full slides, videos, and paper abstracts:

First, a few weeks ago I’ve had another opportunity to outline the key arguments of my 2019 book Are Filter Bubbles Real?, in a talk to the Media Futures research centre in Bergen, Norway. My sincere thanks especially to Hallvard Moe for organising this.

Axel Bruns. “Are Filter Bubbles Real?” Invited presentation to Media Futures Research Centre for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation, Bergen, Norway, 16 Apr. 2021.

In another European presentation, I also had the opportunity to present a keynote on my COVID-19 disinformation research with Edward Hurcombe and Stephen Harrington to the PolKomm 2021 conference organised by the Weizenbaum-Institut in Berlin – many thanks to Christoph Neuberger for the invitation. I presented this in German, and I don’t think there’s a video recording of the presentation; here, though, are the slides at least:

Without in-person conferences to liveblog, this site has been a little quiet recently. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any news to report – so here is the first of a number of posts with updates on recent activities. First of all, I’m very pleased that a number of articles I’ve contributed to have finally been published over the past few months – and in particular, that they represent the results of a range of collaborations with new and old colleagues.

The first of these is a new book chapter led by my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague and former PhD student Ehsan Dehghan, which provides a useful update on his and our current approach to discourse analysis. Building on Ehsan’s work for his excellent PhD thesis, the book chapter connects a detailed methodological overview with the conceptual approaches of Laclau and Mouffe, exploring the presence of agonistic and antagonistic tendencies across a number of case studies. The chapter was published in the third volume in Rebecca Lind’s Produsing Theory book series, which in its title also draws on my concept of produsage, of course.

Dehghan, Ehsan, Axel Bruns, Peta Mitchell, and Brenda Moon. “Discourse-Analytical Studies on Social Media Platforms: A Data-Driven Mixed-Methods Approach.” Produsing Theory in a Digital World 3.0, ed. Rebecca Ann Lind. New York: Peter Lang, 2020. 159–77. DOI:10.3726/b13192/20.

A second new article results from another collaboration with a former PhD student, Felix Münch, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg. Building on the work Felix presented at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium in Urbino, this article in Social Media + Society outlines a new approach to mapping the network structure of a national Twittersphere, offering a pathway towards generating some critically important baseline data against which observations from hashtag- and keyword-based studies may be compared.

Münch, Felix Victor, Ben Thies, Cornelius Puschmann, and Axel Bruns. “Walking through Twitter: Sampling a Language-Based Follow Network of Influential Twitter Accounts.” Social Media + Society 7.1, (2021) DOI:10.1177/2056305120984475.

Third, I’m also very pleased to have made a contribution to a new article in Digital Journalism by Magdalena Wischnewski, a visiting PhD scholar supported by the RISE-SMA research network coordinated by Stefan Stieglitz at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Caught up in the travel disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Magdalena spent rather more time with us at the QUT DMRC than we had planned, but happily we were able to put this extra time to good use and investigate the motivations for sharing hyper-partisan content (in this case study, from InfoWars) on Twitter.

Like most of us, the current COVID-19 crisis has forced me to work from home for the foreseeable future, but my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have remained just as busy – in fact, of course, as a significant driver of journalistic coverage, of newssharing through social media (including both legitimate news and various forms of mis- and disinformation), and of general social media debate and discussion, the crisis intersects directly with some of our core research areas.

Many of us in this field now have urgent research projects in train that address some of these phenomena, and there are also many important conversations about how we can engage in rapid research and publication projects without sacrificing the necessary scholarly rigour. At the same time a number of key public outreach activities have also been organised to ensure that we have the platforms to share our findings with the general public.

My own focus in this has been to investigate the patterns of what the World Health Organisation has described as an ‘infodemic’: the viral transmission of mis- and disinformation associated with the coronavirus pandemic that has the potential to do real harm to the general population. This also aligns with a new research project on Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (funded by the Australian Research Council and also involving Stephen Harrington, Dan Angus, Scott Wright, Jenny Stromer-Galley, and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen) which is about to commence.

Together with my colleague Tim Graham I have presented some early observations from this work, focussing especially on the dynamics of some common COVID-19 conspiracy theories, in the Australia Institute’s ‘Australia at Home’ online seminar series. The video from our presentation is below, and I have also posted the full slides and background to the seminar.

Further, I was also very pleased to participate in a public discussion organised by Jack Qiu for the Chinese Communication Association, as part of their Solidarity Symposium series. Together with some of the leading Chinese digital and social media communication researchers, we had an intensive and wide-ranging discussion about the opportunities and challenges of doing this research, from home or elsewhere, and shared some of our own emerging insights into communication patterns during the current crisis. The seminar video is below, and I’ve posted more details elsewhere.

Together with some of my colleagues from the QUT Digital Media Research Centre, I’ve just released a new, detailed analysis of the structure of the Australian Twittersphere. Covering some 3.72 million Australian Twitter accounts, the 167 million follower/followee connections between them, and the 118 million tweets posted by these accounts during the first quarter of 2017, the new article with Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, and Troy Sadkowsky, published in December 2017 in the open-access journal Social Media + Society, maps the structure of the best-connected core of the Australian Twittersphere network:

The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the Follower/Followee Network

Twitter is now a key platform for public communication between a diverse range of participants, but the overall shape of the communication network it provides remains largely unknown. This article provides a detailed overview of the network structure of the Australian Twittersphere and identifies the thematic drivers of the key clusters within the network. We identify some 3.72 million Australian Twitter accounts and map the follower/followee connections between the 255,000 most connected accounts; we utilize community detection algorithms to identify the major clusters within this network and examine their account populations to identify their constitutive themes; we examine account creation dates and reconstruct a timeline for the Twitter adoption process among different communities; and we examine lifetime and recent tweeting patterns to determine the historically and currently most active clusters in the network. In combination, this offers the first rigorous and comprehensive study of the network structure of an entire national Twittersphere.

I published a preview of some of the study’s key findings in The Conversation in May 2017. Meanwhile, my paper at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in September 2017 built on this new Twittersphere map to test for the existence of echo chambers and filter bubbles in Australian Twitter – and found little evidence to support the thesis:

We’re already deep into February 2017, but I thought I’d finally put together an overview of what I’ve been up to during the past year, at least as far as research outputs are concerned. It’s been a busy year by any measure, with a number of key projects coming to completion; research publications from some of these are still in production, but here’s what’s already come out.

Our Digital Methods pre-conference workshop at AoIR 2016, combining presenters from the Digital Methods Initiative at the University of Amsterdam and the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology starts with a presentation by Richard Rogers on the recent history of digital methods. He points out the gradual transition from a conceptualisation of the Internet and the Web as cyberspace or as a virtual space to an understanding of the Web as inherently linked with the 'real' world: online rather than offline becomes the baseline, and there is an increasing sense of online groundedness.

I’m delighted to share a couple of new publications written with my esteemed colleagues in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre – and as if we weren’t working on enough research projects already, this year is about to get an awful lot busier soon, too. First, though, to the latest articles:

Axel Bruns, Brenda Moon, Avijit Paul, and Felix Münch. “Towards a Typology of Hashtag Publics: A Large-Scale Comparative Study of User Engagement across Trending Topics.” Communication Research and Practice 2.1 (2016): 20-46.

This article, in a great special issue of Communication Research and Practice on digital media research methods that was edited by my former PhD student Jonathon Hutchinson, updates my previous work with Stefan Stieglitz that explored some key metrics for a broad range of hashtag datasets and identified some possible types of hashtags using those metrics. In this new work, we find that the patterns we documented then still hold today, and add some further pointers towards other types of hashtags. We’re particularly thankful to our colleagues Jan Schmidt, Fabio Giglietto, Steven McDermott, Till Keyling, Xi Cui, Steffen Lemke, Isabella Peters, Athanasios Mazarakis, Yu-Chung Cheng, and Pailin Chen, who contributed some of their own datasets to our analysis.

Folker Hanusch and Axel Bruns. “Journalistic Branding on Twitter: A Representative Study of Australian Journalists’ Profile Descriptions.” Digital Journalism (2016).

The Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) at Queensland University of Technology (QUT), where I am based, is now calling for expressions of interest from prospective postgraduate research students as part of the University’s annual Scholarship Round.

The DMRC conducts world-leading research that helps society understand and adapt to the changing digital media environment. It is the leading Australian centre for the fields of media and communication – areas in which QUT has achieved the highest possible rankings in ERA, the national research quality assessment exercise. We are actively engaged with the Asian region across all our research programs; and we have a strong commitment to research training for academic and industry researchers alike. 

Applicants with excellent academic track records (equal to an Australian Bachelor Degree with First Class Honours) or equivalent research experience may be eligible for competitive PhD scholarships to undertake study with us. Successful applicants will work on topics that align closely with one or more of our four research programs. The DMRC is also offering a number of additional top-ups to these scholarships for highly ranked students.

Closing date: 30th September 2015 (earlier enquiries essential)

Further information on our research programs, PhD topics for 2016, and how to apply is here:  http://tinyurl.com/dmrcphd