Participatory Journalism and Citizen Engagement (ARC Linkage)

Sometimes things just come together. We've only done a soft launch of the Youdecide2007 site which will provide hyperlocal citizen journalism coverage of the upcoming federal election in Australia, with a number of electorate profiles, interviews with local citizen and MPs, news releases, and opinion pieces now available on the site - but that hasn't stopped the site from attracting a good number of visitors, some press coverage, and now even a mention in parliamentary question time. A little while ago, Jason Wilson did a phone interview with Liberal Party member for Herbert, Peter Lindsay (available on the site as a nice YouTube clip overlaid with images from the electorate). In the interview, the MP rather appears to digress from his prepared talking points (about half-way through the clip), and makes the somewhat general claim that "young people today are financially illiterate", thereby causing themselves unnecessary mortgage stress. The federal opposition was quick to pick up on the story, and the Honorable Kevin07 engaged in some opportunistic political point-scoring on the basis of the statement.

As we're slowly approaching the official start of the Australian federal election campaign (not that the unofficial campaign hasn't already started...), we're also getting very close to the launch of our citizen journalism site to accompany the election. This is the first major project in a three-year ARC Linkage research programme around citizen journalism which involves SBS, On Line Opinion, Cisco Systems, the Brisbane Institute, and my colleagues and me at QUT Creative Industries.

Boston.
In addition to the various vodcast-based means of staying up to date with political developments in Australia and the world even while in the sadly news-starved U.S., I'm also a regular reader of Larvatus Prodeo at the moment - one of the most consistently insightful Australian political group blogs. (The Prodeans are having a great deal of fun at the expense of the Canberra press gallery punditariat at the moment - very enjoyable.)

So, in that context it's very timely that my article on mapping the Australian political blogosphere using the IssueCrawler research tool has just been published in …

Hot on the heals of my research into blog coverage of the David Hicks case, some more of my IssueCrawler crawls have completed recently. Eventually (when a number of followp-up crawls I'm planning for the coming weeks also complete), I'll analyse them in some more detail, but for now, here are a few preliminary observations. Larger images of the network graphs are on Flickr; click the respective images to see them. I've also uploaded the interactive SVG graphs; you'll need the Adobe SVG viewer plugin in Internet Explorer to display them correctly...

Leeds.
I'm really quite happy with the way that my first real attempts to use the IssueCrawler tool to map the Australian blogosphere have turned out. As I've mentioned here previously, I'm currently exploring this tool as a means of tracing how particularly topics are discussed across the distributed and ad hoc networks of blog-based conversation, and I used the case of Australian-born Guantanamo Bay detainee David Hicks as a case study - with renewed calls for the Australian federal government to urge the Bush administration to finally bring Hicks to trial or release him (he was captured in …

Tonight I'm at UQ yet again, for the second CCCS public lecture by visiting scholar Georgina Born (and you've got to admire my restraint in not titling this blog entry "Born Again"). This talk looks like it's going to be more generally about the lessons to be learnt from the BBC's history and present. She begins by noting the distance between executive rhetoric and the reality of work in public service broadcasters (PSB), but of course such contradictions characterise any complex organisation.

I'm spending the afternoon at a public lecture by Georgina Born from Cambridge University, at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies at the University of Queensland (who, as it turns out, for some time was also the cellist and bassist in British Prog icons Henry Cow). She begins with a nod towards Habermas's public sphere concept, which in relation to broadcasting has been seen as having been imperfectly realised (e.g. through the universalism of service, reach, and programming of the BBC in Britain). In these media debates, the specifically literary and cultural dimensions of the original conception of the public sphere appear to have been ignored, however, and there is also a gender issue here which privileges 'hard' content (e.g. news) over 'soft' content such as drama.

As I arrived back in Brisbane, there was good news relating to my research work waiting for me here. Some time ago, we'd put in a proposal for a Linkage grant project to the Australian Research Council - and after a considerable waiting period, Linkage outcomes were finally announced a couple of weeks ago. So, I'm happy to report that our participatory news project has finally received the go-ahead (and the $380,000 of funding over four years attached to it) from the ARC. This is a project for which I'll be a co-Chief Investigator with my QUT colleagues Terry Flew and Stuart Cunningham - and our industry partners are SBS, National Forum, the Brisbane Institute, and Cisco Systems. I'm particularly looking forward to working with SBS on this, who (in addition to being the Australian home of football) are also one of the most innovative and responsible broadcast organisations in Australia.