Snurb's blog

Bremen.
The next session at the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ ECREA 2010 pre-conference starts with Stefan Hauser and Martin Luginbühl, whose focus is on textual analysis. Their background is in linguistics, and they are interested in moving beyond the idea that culture, language, nation, and territory form one unproblematic entity – more promising is a more flexible definition by which cultures articulate themselves along a variety of dimensions.

They take a praxeological understanding of culture, therefore: respecting the performative as well as semiotic dimension; taking culture as a category of both content and form; and seeing language as a reflection on spatial affiliation as well as a means of creating space. This connects to contrastive textology, which through parallel text analysis (the comparison of parallel textual corpora) has shown that genres vary according to national and language borders.

Bremen.
If it’s Monday, this must be (a very chilly) Bremen – I’ve made it to the ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ conference that is itself a pre-conference to the European Communication Conference (ECREA) in Hamburg. We start today with a keynote by Sonia Livingstone, who begins by noting the importance of cross-national research, but also the difficulties in scaling up research in this way. What are the key problems here, then – intellectual, political, and practical, not least also for multicultural and multinational research teams?

There is also a strong push towards the international sharing of research outcomes, of course; there is significant growth in large-scale research projects, and this is driven by the imperative to understand global communications phenomena. But when is it reasonable also to retain some boundaries around projects? Comparative research is at the cutting edge of research in media and communication, but has yet to be fully thought through – organisationally, methodologically, and from many other perspectives. Two key areas can be distinguished here: cross-national research, and open-ended cross-border mapping of transnational media flows. Published projects often tend to turn out to be hybrid, however – theoretical principles are not always translated into methodological approaches.

It’s that time of the year again – I’m frantically working to get ready for my October overseas trip, which will take me through much of northern Europe. Here’s what’s on the agenda – if you’re in the neighbourhood, say hi (and connect with me on Dopplr to make catching up easier).

My first stop is in Berlin, where we’ve scheduled a couple of workshops for our Mapping Online Publics ARC Discovery team (involving my CCI colleague Jean Burgess as well as our partner researchers Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai from Sociomantic Labs). From there, I’m heading on to Bremen and Hamburg, where we’re presenting our blog and Twitter network mapping at the ECREA 2010 conference (Hamburg, 12-15 Oct.) and its Doing Global Media Studies pre-conference (Bremen, 11-12 Oct.). Afterwards, we’re returning for our second round of project workshops with the guys from Sociomantic.

It’s that time of the year again: my research centre, the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI), is calling for applications from prospective PhD students (and while this call focusses on PhDs, Masters and Honours applications are also due around the same time…). Undertaking your PhD at the CCI means you will be working with world class researchers who can offer supervision of the highest standards. Our research activities cover a broad range of emerging issues, themes and projects across the entertainment and creative industries including innovation and policy development; significant project collaborations with Asia; a major project looking at broadband services; mapping the creative industries; IP law; a global cultural futures study and other projects which engage community and industry partners in creative industries from major film studios to the Salvation Army and ‘at-risk’ young people working as media co-creators. visit the CCI Projects Page at http://www.cci.edu.au/projects to find out more about the Centre’s activities. There are a broad range of research opportunities available across the CCI’s member organisations in Australia, and I encourage you to have a look at the Website for the full details – application deadlines vary from university to university. Successful PhD projects would start in early 2011.

For applications to my university – Queensland University of Technology, based in Brisbane, Australia –, the relevant application deadlines are 30 September 2010 for international students, and 15 Oct. 2010 for domestic students.

Overall, I am interested in PhD applications from anyone with a research interest in the broad areas of produsage, Web 2.0, and social media, either in general or with a specific focus on fields and technologies including blogs, citizen journalism, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, social network analysis, government 2.0, or related themes. If any of those themes are of interest to you, please get in touch.

In addition to these broader themes, we’re also calling specifically for expressions of interest for a number of concrete research projects. In my own case, these are related to our research into mapping Australian online publics which will examine interactions across blogs, Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr, which we’re undertaking as part of an ARC Discovery project, and to our work researching our changing media ecologies. For these projects, we’re particularly interested in expressions of interest from potential students who operate in the following areas:

I spoke at an event organised by the Queensland Chapter of the Australasian Study of Parliament Group last night, in the Queensland Parliamentary Annexe – alongside Democrats leader turned Greens candidate Andrew Bartlett, On Line Opinion founder Graham Young, and Courier-Mail political journalist Craig Johnstone.

The theme of the evening was ‘whether bloggers are the new fourth estate’ – and here’s what  had to say (a bit of a rant, as is pretty much unavoidable after the election campaign we’ve had):

Over on Fairfax’s National Times opinion site, I’ve now posted a first article examining the use of Twitter during the early election campaign – for the first week of campaigning, excluding the debate last Sunday (which I’ve examined on our network mapping blog Mapping Online Publics, here and here).

Just a quick plug for yet another project blog: as regular readers of this blog may know, with my colleague Jean Burgess and our collaborators Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai at Sociomantic Labs I was successful in winning an ARC Discovery grant in last year’s round, for a three-year project aiming to map public communication in Australia across a range of social media spaces.

With the project now getting underway in earnest (and we’ve already presented our methodology and early outcomes at a number of conferences), Jean and I have now set up Mapping Online Publics as a blog to cover our research methods and outcomes.

Canberra.
Finally at ANZCA 2010 we're on to Hamideh Molaei, whose interest is in the use of social media during the 2009 presidential elections in Indonesia. Social media have impacted on political processes, of course - social media are used for networking and fundraising, political discussion, and the dissemination of political messages. Facebook has been used in this way in a number of contexts, of course - both by politicians and ordinary citizens.

Six social media sites - including Facebook - are amongst the ten most popular sites in Indonesia. The last presidential election there was held on 8 July 2009, as the second direct election after the end of the Suharto regime, it was won by Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Facebook was used as a venue for advertising and disseminating election-related material. Candidates had personal pages; there were election education groups; and a variety of independent pages were also set up.

Canberra.
The next speaker at ANZCA 2010 is Julie Freeman, whose interest is in impediments to local e-government development. She suggests that there needs to be further education about ICTs of policy makers; one of the councillors of the city of Casey, in the south-east of Melbourne, whom she interviewed asked whether email was considered to be Internet use, for example.

The current population of Casey is around 256,000 residents (on 400 square kilometres), and continues to grow; some 89% are under 60. There are 11 councillors representing residents in the city council. The city has an extensive and sophisticated Website (with multilingual information and mobile versions), and its Twitter account (@CityOfCasey) has some 500 followers; there are significant visitor numbers (over 700,000 in 2008/9), while call centre calls are slowly declining. There is also a civic networking site, and the overall e-government costs are around $10,000 per annum.

Canberra.
The next speaker at ANZCA 2010 is Serene Tng, whose interest is in the influence of citizen journalism on journalistic reporting; her case study are the Mumbai terrorist attacks. Citizen reporting is increasingly important in such major news events; this is social media in action. Serene examined the coverage of the attacks across four major international newspapers, in order to examine how citizen reporting affects the traditional dominance of standard institutional sources.

The role of the media is fundamental in any terrorist acts: the media could be seen as promoting the terrorist cause by reporting acts of terror, but government sources tend to dominate in the reporting and framing of such events; especially in breaking news, however, government sources are often backgrounded in favour of voices from the scene, and this may affect how stories are framed at such times.