A Few More Updates before the End of the Year

As the year and my Guest Professorship here at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich are coming to an end, here are a handful of final updates hot of the presses.

First, I’m very happy to say that at article about the Russian propaganda organ RT’s audiences on Facebook has just been published in Information, Communication & Society. This was a difficult piece of research not least because it involved coding data in six languages, but I’m delighted to say that we managed to find native speakers of all those languages (Russian, English, Spanish, French, Arabic, and German) in-house at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre. My sincere thanks especially to my excellent colleague Sofya Glazunova for leading this project.

Sofya Glazunova, Axel Bruns, Edward Hurcombe, Sílvia X. Montaña-Niño, Souleymane Coulibaly, and Abdul K. Obeid. “Soft Power, Sharp Power? Exploring RT’s Dual Role in Russia’s Diplomatic Toolkit.” Information, Communication & Society, 21 Dec. 2022. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2022.2155485.

Just a few days earlier, a new article about the social media amplification of articles in The Conversation that referred to preprint content relating to the COVID-19 pandemic also came out, in Media International Australia. But I have to stress that I only had limited involvement with this work – most of the heavy lifting was done by DMRC Visiting Scholar Alice Fleerackers (usually of Simon Fraser University) and my DMRC colleague Michelle Riedlinger.

Alice Fleerackers, Michelle Riedlinger, Axel Bruns, and Jean Burgess. “Academic Explanatory Journalism and Emerging COVID-19 Science: How Social Media Accounts Amplify The Conversation’s Preprint Coverage.” Media International Australia, 19 Dec. 2022. DOI: 10.1177/1329878X221145022.

A few months ago my colleague Aljosha Karim Schapals and I also published a new article in Media and Communication that explores how journalists have perceived and reacted to the challenge of ‘fake news’. This was based on Aljosha’s extensive interviews with newsworkers in Australia, the UK, and Germany, and provides some fascinating insights into the journalistic mindset in relation to this critical challenge.

Aljosha Karim Schapals and Axel Bruns. “Responding to ‘Fake News’: Journalistic Perceptions of and Reactions to a Delegitimising Force.” Media and Communication 10.3 (2022). DOI: 10.17645/mac.v10i3.5401.

And I have a couple of additional solo publications that I haven’t talked about yet, too: in July I published a practical guide to basic network analysis using the popular open source tool Gephi in the Sage Research Methods collection. This introduces readers to the basics of network analysis and works through some introductory exercises using random network data. Eventually I’m hoping to write an additional guide about importing network data from social media platforms into Gephi.

Axel Bruns. “How to Visually Analyse Networks Using Gephi.” SAGE Research Methods: Doing Research Online, ed. Helene Snee. London: Sage, 2022. DOI: 10.4135/9781529609752.

Around the same time, my Internet Policy Review on the ‘filter bubble’ myth was translated into Spanish, and published in the Revista Latinoamericana de Economía y Sociedad Digital journal. Hopefully this will help address the continued use of this misleading metaphor in Spanish-speaking research, too.

Axel Bruns. “El Filtro Burbuja.” Revista Latinoamericana de Economía y Sociedad Digital (July 2022). DOI: 10.53857/NDHQ9707.

Finally for something completely different: my colleague Abdul Karim Obeid very kindly included me in the author list for his Frontiers in Psychology article on quantum cognition, too – though I really don’t know that I deserve that recognition. Anyway, here it is:

Abdul K. Obeid, Peter Bruza, Catarina Moreira, Axel Bruns, and Dan Angus. “An Extension of Combinatorial Contextuality for Cognitive Protocols.” Frontiers in Psychology 13 (2022). DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.871028.