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The second speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is William Moner, whose focus is on participatory media systems analysis, especially in relation to the political economy of communication. This is inspired by Vincent Mosco’s call for a bridge between political economics, communication studies, and cultural studies, as well as related fields.

Oh noes, due to a very slow elevator I’ve come in late to the morning session at AoIR 2018, and have missed some of David Myles’s talk already. He studied online content from a range of Canadian pro-choice advocates that sought to reconstruct the fictional character of Anne of Green Gables as an abortion access activist and feminist icon; somewhat unsurprisingly this was attacked in turn by pro-life advocates.

The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2018 is Christian Strippel, whose focus is on the discourse architecture of German news Websites. The background to this work is a project to develop the tools to automatically detect and mitigate hate speech in comment sections in such sites.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Miya Williams Fayne, whose focus is on the shift from the black press to broader black media. Early black press were mainly abolitionist newspapers, and were officially recognised by the National Newspapers Association. Today many black media are online and have diversified their areas of focus, and Miya conducted interviews with a number of the editors and operators of such media organisations.

The final panel on this day at AoIR 2018 is on journalism, and starts with Òscar Coromina. His focus is on the influence that trending topics on Twitter had on journalistic coverage of the Catalan independence referendum. Trending topics are important in directing user attention, especially in the context of breaking news, and Twitter is of course also selling advertising at the top of its trending topics list, indicating their importance.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Ellis Jones, who focusses on the connections between context collapse and the imagined audience. Social media users navigate the challenge of context collapse by imagining an ideal audience for their content, and Ellis is exploring this especially in the context of DIY music content – but context collapse may also lead to the presence of an unimagined audience.

I missed most of the first talk in the post-lunch panel at AoIR 2018, but here we go with Sophie Bishop’s paper on sponsored content on YouTube, in the context of beauty vloggers. Fans of these vloggers generally understand that such content is often commercially sponsored and supported in some form; they are very active in policing vloggers’ behaviours, establishing appropriate boundaries of authenticity in this space.

The last paper in this AoIR 2018 session was mine, presenting on our TrISMA project to gather social media data in Australia at scale. Here are the slides:

The third speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Harsh Taneja, who promises to present an alternative history of big data. At present, many big data datasets are highly platform-specific, such data can generally be accessed via platform APIs or scraped from platform Websites. But big data research existed before the Internet: Harsh points here to the early days of advertising-supported broadcasting, when advertisers first required audience measurements.

The next speaker in our AoIR 2018 session is Ericka Menchen-Trevino, whose research interest is on the study of selective exposure; this is often studied through surveys or lab experiments, but can be usefully complemented with Web history data. Such an integration between conventional social science data and digital trace data provides a blueprint for new possibilities across a range of research interests, in fact.