The final presenters in this AoIR 2016 session are my colleagues Peta Mitchell and Felix Münch, who also focus on the Twitter reaction to David Bowie's death. Twitter as a platform can be useful for studying public responses to such events, but at the same time the focus on a hashtag only also limits the study to deliberately self-selecting tweets and users; a focus on 'Bowie' as a keyword provides a different perspective. This is also complicated by the one percent rate limit of the Twitter API, as 'Bowie' tweets spiked well above that limit.
The next paper in this AoIR 2016 session is by Hilde van den Bulck, which shifts our focus to the mourning of David Bowie after his death on 10 January 2016. Bowie had had a stellar and constantly shifting career, of course, but had also managed to keep his private life comparatively private, which is why his death came quite unexpectedly. Not least because of this there was a massive reaction to news of his death on Facebook and Twitter.
One of the spaces that quickly emerged for such 'i-mourning' was the #bowie hashtag on Twitter. This became …
The next Web Science 2016 presenter is Jack Webster, who focusses on music recommender systems. Such recommender systems could generate filter bubbles, but that threat is nothing new; the cultural intermediaries described by Pierre Bourdieu fulfilled very similar roles and could have engendered very similar patterns.
But music recommender systems do not draw on a lifetime of personal experience, but rather utilise large datasets on users' engagement with music streaming and download services, applying algorithms designed by human coders. How do these different human and technological actors come together in creating and operating recommender systems, then?
The final paper in this session at AoIR 2012 is by Elycia Taylor, whose focus is on the reaction to the 2012 Grammy win by Chris Brown, who had assaulted his partner, the singer Rihanna, following the 2009 Grammys. Brown had become a persona non grata at the time, but has made a recent comeback, and many of his new fans appear to be prepared to overlook this violent history. There are also rumours about Brown and Rihanna working together again.
Technology can be used to support survivors of violence; was such support apparent in online discussions around the 2012 …
The next session at AoIR 2012 starts with Catherine Knight Steele, whose focus is on the online expression of grief following the death of Whitney Houston. Many of the messages being posted following her death seemed more like the support offered to family members than a public expression of fandom. The same was not true in the same way following the death of Michael Jackson, when many more critical responses were aired.
The grieving online following Houston's death can be understood as ritual – there was no documentation of news, but a reflection on who we are, how we express …
The final presenters in this AoIR 2012 session are Camila Monteiro, Raquel Recuero, and Adriana Amaral, who begin by noting the demographics of Twitter in Brazil: there are some 33 million Brazilian Twitter users, most of whom are adolescents. Their interest in this paper is especially in fandom and anti-fandom around the pop band Restart, and in the social capital which such activities create and maintain.
Many of the trending topics in Brazil are focussed on popular music, in fact, and fans seem to artificially attempt to create such trending topics. The researchers engaged in interviews with fans as well …
Next up at AoIR 2012 it's Tim Highfield and me again, presenting a paper co-authored with our colleague Stephen Harrington. Here are the slides; audio to follow. and audio.
Gothenburg. The last keynote at AoIR 2010 is by the fabulous Nancy Baym, whose recent work has focussed especially on the Swedish independent music industry. Nancy’s based in Kansas, but is now well connected with the Swedish music scene – and that’s just one example of the international cultural interconnections which we’re now seeing.
Her initial interest in Swedish music stems from exposure to independent music stores in the US which import overseas music; most of these stores are labours of love rather than significantly successful commercial enterprises – and they are now also selling music back to Sweden, in …
The music on this CD is drawn from a range of recordings I’ve made on my laptop during various overseas trips between 2005 and 2008.
