Blogs

The second day at Digital Methods in Vienna starts with a speed panel which begins with a paper by Philip Sinner on the German Bundesliga's social media activities. Football is a popular and everyday culture phenomenon in Germany, and has an important place in people's lives; the clubs themselves do professional PR work, of course, but have yet to fully embrace social media as part of this work. How successful is this in managing identities, relationships, and information to date? What are they trying to do? Which social media platforms are they using?

Philip examined the various social media offerings and spoke to the media directors of various Bundesliga clubs, as well as reviewing the content of their social media activities. He first went to the home pages of the clubs, to identify which social media platforms are being linked to from these pages - but not all of their social media activities (especially for the international market, e.g. Bayern Munich's Weibo accounts) are linked to from these pages. Of course there are also various fan-operated accounts, which are sometimes difficult to distinguish from official accounts.

The final paper in this Digital Methods panel is by Axel Maireder and Stefan Schlögl, whose interest is in the #aufschrei discussion about sexism in German politics. How did this emerge from a small-scale conversation on Twitter to a major trending hashtag, and subsequently to a cross-media event, over the course of a few hours? What happened here was the growth of a communicative network in the form of a partial public or issue public related to the topic on Twitter, interleaved with other publics as enabled by the conventional mainstream media.

New forms of discussion fora and spaces, especially also including social media, enable new and lasting connections between themes and individuals. These connections are increasingly manifested in the data structures which are available through social media APIs, too, and structure the flow of communication. URLs shared in tweets and other social media updates further document the connection of such communication with other, external media, while hashtags enable the development of ad hoc publics independent of existing follower networks.

The next presentation in this Digital Methods panel is by Christoph Neuberger and Sanja Kapidzic, whose focus is on the question of how to define themes and topics in online communication. Using single keywords to define topics is too simplistic, and there often is an implication that we know what a topic is when we see it - but what exactly is a topic?

Sometimes, specific labels do emerge for given topics, which makes tracking them easier, but these labels themselves may evolve. In live topics it becomes necessary to track these themes and continue to update the markers of themes which are seen as relevant. Themes may be defined variously by broad news beats, by thematic areas, by single themes, or at the most specific level by specific events; these levels of specificity also overlap considerably, however.

The next panel at the Digital Methods conference begins with a panel by Theresa Sauter and me, on the viral distribution of links to the video of Julia Gillard's "misogyny" speech in 2012 as it was posted in full on the ABC News site. Unfortunately the audio recording didn't work out, so below are the slides only - do make sure you click on the links to see the video and the animations of the emerging retweet network.

The final speakers in this Digital Methods plenary are Axel Maireder and Katrin Jungnickel, whose interest is in the uncertainties of the Facebook timeline. Facebook has continued to tinker with how the timeline is selected and presented for several years now, and this affects the flow of communication on the platform; what, then, are the factors which determine that flow?

This study combined content analysis and user surveys, but both these approaches have their drawbacks - it is impossible from the outside to track the content of users' timelines, for example, but surveys of users also suffer from self-reporting biases. In the end, the researchers asked users to copy the links they received through their timelines into an online survey, and to discuss the content of the URLs and the Facebook friends they received them from. Issues with privacy as well as the tedious nature of this approach also affect the results, however. Some 550 users participated in the study.

The next plenary speaker at Digital Methods is Martin Emmer, whose focus is on sampling methods in digital contexts. Online media are now important public fora, and conventional media are increasingly using digital channels to transmit their content as well; this also leads to a shift in media usage, of course, and some of that shift is also driven by generational change.

If we need to examine the digital space to understand current debates in the public sphere, then, how do we generate representative samples of online content and activities? With traditional mass media, it was possible to draw on comprehensive lists of media providers, with a small handful of alternative media; in the digital environment, channels and platforms have multiplied massively, and it is no longer trivial to select a small number of sites and spaces which represent all online activity.

The next session at Digital Methods is a plenary panel which begins with Christina Schumann, whose focus is on Google and other search engines as technological actors on the Internet. Search engines are especially important as they now serve as a kind of gatekeeper on the Net - but the criteria they use for ranking and structuring information are often far from transparent.

The basic approach of search engines is to crawl or otherwise gather Internet data which are then indexed and processed into a database; this database is queried as a search query is entered into the search engine. Factors in returning search results include on-page information (content, programming, and design of Web pages) as well as off-page metadata (especially the link networks surrounding each page, relative to the theme of the query).

At the end of an extended trip to a range of conferences and symposia I've made my way to Vienna, where I'm attending the DGPuK Digital Methods conference at the University of Vienna. The conference is in German, but I'll try to blog the presentations in English nonetheless - wish me luck... We begin with keynote by Jürgen Pfeffer, addressing - not surprisingly - the question of 'big data' in communications research.

Jürgen begins by asking what's different about 'big data' research. In our field, we're using 'big data' on communication and interaction to work towards a real-time analysis of large-scale, dynamic sociocultural systems, necessarily especially through computational approaches - this draws on the data available from major social networks and other participative sites, but it aims not to research "the Internet", but society by examining communication patterns on the Internet (and elsewhere).

I am delighted to report the culmination of a very intensive, highly collaborative project: our new book Twitter and Society, edited by Katrin Weller, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, Cornelius Puschmann, and me, was launched at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Denver a few days ago and is now available from Amazon and the Peter Lang Website. I’m very pleased that we managed to get the first copies of the book printed in time for the conference, to be able to hand them to the many of our contributors who were present at AoIR 2013.

The book is a 450-page anthology of the very best of current Twitter research, providing a comprehensive overview of research methods, concepts, challenges, and applications. It features some 31 chapters, a foreword by the University of Amsterdam’s Richard Rogers – and we’re particularly proud to have been able to use the painting Die Zwitschermaschine (The Twittering Machine) by Paul Klee as the book cover. Many, many thanks to our 45 contributors for their fabulous contributions. A full list of chapters is below – and here’s a group photo from the launch at AoIR 2013. You can also follow further updates about the book at @twitsocbook!

After the “Compromised Data” symposium in Toronto I’ve made my way over to Europe, where my first stop is a PhD symposium in Copenhagen where I’ve been invited to present an update on my work on produsage. Here, I’ve revisited the fundamental concept of produsage and made the link to my current work on the uses of social media, especially in a journalistic context. Slides and audio below: