In just over a week, I'm off to Europe for the first of a number of conference trips this year; as always, I'll try to blog my progress as I go. My first stop is the WebSci '09 conference, where I'm presenting a poster on the background to our blog mapping project (which has already produced papers at the AoIR and ISEA conferences last year, with more to come). Should be interesting, even if it's a lot more (computer and social) science-y than what I'd usually attend. And, they've got Tim Berners-Lee as a keynote speaker - no doubt in honour of yet another anniversary, and one which I didn't even mention in my post the other day: yes, the Web, too, first happened 20 years ago (or at least that's when Sir Tim first proposed his hypertext transfer protocol)!.

Copenhagen.
We're starting the last day of this very enjoyable AoIR 2008 conference already. This one is going to busy for me, as three of my papers are scheduled for today - two of them, in fact, in competing sessions (but luckily my colleagues Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai, who are the lead authors, are able to present one of them). This morning, we're starting with a session on the online dimensions of national elections across a number of countries.

The first presenter is Yeon-Ok Lee, whose focus is on last December's presidential election in South Korea. The previous election to this, of course, was won by a small margin by the liberal underdog Rooh Moo-Hyun, due in good part to the activism of Korea's Netizens and to coverage by citizen journalism site OhmyNews. This made the 2007 election a particularly interesting case for further research.

A few days ago Geert Lovink contacted me with some interview questions regarding our research into the Australian political blogosphere - this is for a new book, Blog Theory, that he's working on with Jodi Dean for release on Polity Press. Here's what I had to say:

GL: You have just done research into the Australian blogosphere. Do you think there is something like an Australian blogosphere and how would you characterize it?

Well, let me start by saying that 'the blog' is simply a media technology (similar to 'the book' or 'the television'), which can be used in any number of different ways. And similar to those other media technologies (where we also don't speak of a 'booksphere' or 'televisionsphere', I've long argued that we're well past the point where to speak of 'blogging' as a unified form makes sense any more.

Singapore.
The ISEA 2008 conference is pretty much over now - the last event broadly connected with it is a talk by new media theorist Lev Manovich in the beautiful Lasalle arts space. With a title of "Cultural Analytics", I wouldn't be so surprised if this was going to be pretty close to what my colleagues at QUT have in mind when they talk about cultural science...

His aim here is to extrapolate from current to future cultural trends, and he notes that such futurism is traditionally very difficult. Part of his approach, therefore, is to develop new projects with his students which may have the potential to set new trends themselves. Overall, he says, we'll see a very significant new cultural development that builds on data mining and data visualisation technologies.

Singapore.
Next up here at ISEA 2008 is Daniela Alina Plewe. Her interest is in the connection of art and business - and she asks about the potential for doing art around business. Interactive media themselves are often used in an economic context, of course, where interactions are also financial transactions. There is a good potential for developing interactive/transactive media works, then; art mash-ups could resemble online businesses.

This could build on the tradition of art about business, of business around art, of art as investment. But what is important here is the dimension of interaction and transaction. In interaction, there is an exchange of meaning, in transaction, there is an exchange of value; and this may take place in the artwork itself, or around it.

Singapore.
The first full day at ISEA 2008 starts with a number of parallel paper sessions - and the first paper in one of these sessions is mine (that is, the paper I've co-authored with Jason Wilson, Barry Saunders, Tim Highfield, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai). I've posted the slides below, and will try to record the audio as well the audio is up now, too.

The next paper is by Atteqa Malik, who begins with a political rock video from Pakistan that has now been parodied by the Pakistani lawyers' movement (replacing rock musicians with lawyers, etc.). That movement, and other online and offline protests, is in response to the takeover of mainstream Pakistani media during the Musharraf regime, of course - indeed, there has been an explosion of media channels in Pakistan in recent years. One further catalyst for such developments was the 2005 earthquake, which created a strong response from younger generations.

Brisbane.
The next session I'm attending at the CCi conference is also (broadly) on citizen journalism. Andrew Kenyon from the University of Melbourne is the first speaker, and his focus is especially on the legal perspective on journalism as public speech, building on interviews with editors, journalists, and other media workers. Legal frameworks enable in particular the search for truth, the maintenance of democracy, and (especially in the US) a critique of government, but public speech is often positioned as fulfilling a more generic function (such as consensus formation). Public speech often critiques, and limited protections for public speech is often seen as having a chilling effect on the diversity of public speech that is possible.

(Crossposted from Gatewatching.)

In this second part, we'll follow on from our discussion of key themes in The Other Cheek, Larvatus Prodeo, and Club Troppo by looking at the concept maps which Leximancer produces. But first, a recap of the background for this study: I've already posted about our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) and the end of January 2008. We distinguish between different functional components of blogs and blog pages, and what I'm focussing on here are the blog posts themselves, which are of course the major discursive element of any blog - as part of our approach, we've separated these posts from all other content on the blog (headers, footers, blogrolls, sidebars, comments sections, etc.).

What I've done here in the first place is to run the concept mapping software Leximancer over the content gathered from a selection of key Australian blogs. In the first part of this post, I simply listed the key terms for each blog in order of frequency (giving a quick indication of what they're frequently talking about), which produced some notable differences between the three blogs. My reading of this is that Club Troppo focusses much more strongly on policy analysis over political wonkery and insider gossip; for The Other Cheek, the balance is reversed, while Larvatus Prodeo sits somewhere in the middle.

In this second part, I'll map these blogs' key terms in relation to one another - terms which frequently co-occur in close proximity to one another in the text are located closer to one another on the map than terms which don't, in other words. The resulting maps provide further support to the observation that the blogs have different points of focus in their day-to-day coverage of politics - and by plotting all frequently-used terms on the map, the exact nature of these topical clusters becomes a little clearer, too.