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.

Trending topics may be hashtags or phrases, and work in similar ways to enable the formation of ad hoc publics or algorithmically generated publics; they are technosocial actors in …

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 final paper in this final session of Social Media & Society 2018 is Sonya Sachdeva, whose interest is in the role of social media in discussing the smoke from wildfires. Wildfires themselves have become more prevalent and more intense around the world, as a result of climate change, and the smoke from such fires can affect far larger areas than the fires themselves. Some two thirds of the United States are affected by the smoke from wildfires, even if they are nowhere near forests and firezones.

If accurate assessments of air quality are unavailable due to gaps in monitoring …

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Wasim Ahmed, whose focus is on discussions of infectious diseases on Twitter. Such diseases can be very deadly, and when outbreaks occur they lead to the public expression of people’s views and opinions via social media. There’s a need to further understand such communication processes, beyond mere metrics, through qualitative and mixed-methods approaches.

The present paper focusses especially on the peaks of the 2009 swine flu and 2014 Ebola outbreaks. What did English-language Twitter users discuss during these times, how do these events compare with each other, and are …

The final session at Social Media & Society 2018 starts with Supraja Gurajala, whose interest is in using Twitter data for responding to air quality issues. Air quality is a major health issue in population and industrial centres around the world, and metrics like the Air Quality Index (AQI) and Particulate Matter index (PM) are key to its assessment.

Air quality monitoring stations exist around the world, but are unevenly distributed. How might the gaps in monitoring be addressed by increasing the number of monitoring stations, given the costs involved in setup and maintenance, then? One option may be to …