Time for another quick news roundup. Following on from the ANZDMC 2012 conference in Brisbane, where Jean Burgess and I presented our research into the use of Twitter during the 2010/11 Christchurch earthquakes, there were another few follow-up presentations of our research on social media and crisis communication.

First, I flew down to Melbourne to run a workshop on social media and disaster resilience together with Chris Fisher from the Queensland state Department for Community Safety, as part of the Disaster Resilient Communities conference. I’ve now published my two presentations from the workshop (slides + audio); they’re both online here.

Canberra.
And the (dubious) honour of presenting the final paper in the final session at DHA 2012 falls to … me. Below is the Powerpoint, and I’ll try to add audio to this as soon as I can, too I've now finally also managed to add the audio, no thanks to a very dysfunctional Slideshare.

Time for a quick update again: I’m hardly even back from the SBPJor conference in Rio de Janeiro in November, but my keynote “Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, Real-Time Feedback: New Challenges for Journalism” from the conference has already been published in the Brazilian Journalism Research journal, alongside the other keynotes. I posted the slides and audio from the presentation last month – and a similar presentation in German, from my visit to Vienna in March, is also online here.

When I arrived back in my office from the Rio trip, I was also very pleased to see that the Digital Difference book, collecting papers from the 2007 Ideas, Cyberspace, Education 3 conference on the shores of Loch Lomond, had finally arrived. It’s been a long road, but congratulations to the editors, Ray Land and Siân Bayne, for sticking with the project. My article, “Beyond Difference: Reconfiguring Education for the User-Led Age”, applies produsage concepts to explore new approaches to education.

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:

Seattle.
The next panel at AoIR 2011 starts with the excellent Luca Rossi, whose focus is on the Twitter coverage of the Chilean mining accident and the subsequent rescue of the miners. Luca begins, though, by pointing to the underlying theory of media events – from the royal wedding (as a kind of 2.0 version, now with added social media, of the Charles & Diana a few decades ago wedding) to crisis and disaster events.

Twitter coverage of the mine rescue in Chile was coordinated through the #rescatemineros hashtag. The miners were trapped underground for some three months, following the 5 August 2010 mine collapse; the event transformed from a crisis event to a more organised media event as it gradually unfolded. How did Twitter cover this; how did messages propagate through the network; and how did Twitter interleave with the wider mediasphere?

Seattle.
The final presenter in our panel at AoIR 2011 is Anders Larsson, who shifts our focus to Sweden. Twitter was used by the national Swedish train operator during the extreme winter of 2010/11 to address the disruptions to train services. There is a strong impetus for major businesses and organisations to be on Twitter, of course; SJ (which used to be the state-owned monopoly train company in Sweden) has been online as @SJ_AB for some time now – but only on weekdays between 9:00 and 16:00 (even though their phone service is online for longer hours).

The last winter generated especially extreme amounts of snowfall; this disrupted train travel to a considerable amount, especially during the Christmas travel season. SJ didn’t use Twitter during the entire Christmas holiday, however (given that much of the crisis happened outside regular business hours?).

Seattle.
My own paper (with Jean), on the Twitter response to the second Christchurch earthquake on 22 February 2011 through the #eqnz hashtag, was next at AoIR 2011. Here are the slides – audio soon, hopefully now also added.

Seattle.
The next speaker in our AoIR 2011 panel is Frances Shaw, who focusses our attention on the December/January 2010 Queensland floods crisis; the peak period in southeast Queensland followed 9 January 2010. The floods washed down from Toowoomba through the Lockyer Valley (were a significant number of lives were lost) and into Ipswich and Brisbane. On Twitter, discussion of the floods was coordinated through the #qldfloods hashtag, and the Queensland Police Service Media Unit account @QPSMedia emerged as a leading actor.

Frances worked through the #qldfloods dataset as well as through tweets sent by and directed at the @QPSMedia account, manually coding a subset of these tweets according to a set scheme: informational tweets; media sharing; help and fundraising; direct experience; and reactions and discussion. Over the entire #qldfloods dataset, discussion and reactions, information, and help and fundraising were especially prominent, tweets to and from @QPSMedia focussed especially on information.

Seattle.
The next session at AoIR 2011 is our own, fabulous panel on crisis communication. We begin with an overview paper by my CCI colleagues Jean Burgess and Kate Crawford, who introduce the idea of acute events. Kate begins by outlining the idea of media ecologies involving a wide range of different media platforms, and their specific performance during acute events (such as crises, but also a range of similar events).

Jean follows on by defining acute events as significant real-world events which are associated with intense bursts in media activity – from political elections to royal weddings, from celebrity deaths to natural disasters. We can identify acute events on the basis of their timeline: a sharp peak of high volume and identity (whether locally or globally); highly mediated, involving multiple actors and interests; on Twitter, coordinated around specific #hashtags; and producing controversies and other adjunctive conversations associated more broadly with the topic.