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Snurb — Saturday 31 May 2025 12:33

Introducing Practice Mapping, at Home and Abroad

Politics | Polarisation | Travel | Journalism | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Social Media Network Mapping | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | ACSPRI 2024 | Bots Building Bridges 2025 | Weizenbaum-Institut 2025 |

I'm about to head off on a brief trip to Germany for a series of conferences and presentations, so this seems like a good moment for another update on recent developments. First off, I'm delighted to finally have a first publication out in the great Social Media + Society journal that introduces our new methodological approach of practice mapping. I've teased this in a few past posts and presentations already, not least in my keynote at the ACSPRI conference in November 2024, but together with my great QUT colleagues Kateryna Kasianenko, Vish Padinjaredath Suresh, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden …

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Snurb — Saturday 8 October 2022 05:29

A Busy End to the Year

Politics | Elections | Travel | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | Conferences | AoIR 2022 | ECREA 2022 | NMRC 2022 | General Teaching Work |

As you are reading this, I’m probably in Zürich. Or in Stavanger. Aarhus. Hamburg. Dublin. Passau. Berlin. Vienna. The last few months of 2022 are going to be very busy.

But first things first: since the start of September, I’ve been in Zürich, on a semester-long guest professorship at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich. We’d originally started planning this in 2019, but COVID-19 and the associated border closures put paid to that idea, and my hosts here have been able to keep the idea alive until now – so here I finally am …

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Snurb — Thursday 12 May 2022 02:02

Following the 2022 Australian Federal Election … from Italy

Politics | Elections | Government | Travel | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Conferences |

I’m on my first conference trip since COVID hit, and currently at Konrad Adenauer’s old summer residence Villa La Collina in Cadenabbia, Italy, where we’ve just concluded the Digital Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres symposium ahead of the massive International Communication Association conference in Paris later this month. Many thanks to Ulrike Klinger and Uta Rußmann for organising the event, and the Adenauer Foundation for hosting us.

On behalf of my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues Dan Angus, Tim Graham, Ehsan Dehghan and myself I presented a first take on social media the 2022 Australian federal election at this …

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Snurb — Friday 30 September 2016 19:35

Some Talks in Oslo ahead of AoIR 2016 in Berlin

Travel | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Industrial Journalism | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | Research Projects | ARC Future Fellowship | AoIR 2016 |

I’m on my way to Berlin for this year’s Association of Internet Researchers conference, which will be one of our biggest yet – but on my way I’ve also swung by Oslo to visit my colleagues in the Social Media and Agenda-Setting in Election Campaigns (SAC) project which is now coming to its conclusion. While there I gave a couple of invited talks on my recent research – and the slides from those presentations are now available here.

First, I visited Anders Larsson at Westerdals Oslo School of Arts, Communication and Technology, where I outlined my thoughts on what …

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Snurb — Monday 16 June 2014 22:03

Conference Blogging Coming Up

Travel | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | Research Projects | Publications | Conferences | Social Media and the Transformation of Public Space (ASMC) 2014 |

I’m currently on the road again, as part of a trip which has already taken me through Hamburg (for a meeting with our research partners at the Hans-Bredow-Institut) and Göttingen (for the inaugural workshop of our new ATN-DAAD-funded research collaboration with colleagues at the Göttingen Digital Humanities Centre. The latter will focus especially on developing new methods for analysing and visualising social media networks, building on the considerable work we’ve already done in this area – and at the workshop last week we’ve already made good progress towards a few new ideas for what we can do. With my …

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Snurb — Friday 5 October 2012 07:12

Around the World in 28 Days (and 14 Papers)

Politics | Elections | Travel | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Social Media in Times of Crisis (ARC Linkage) | Social Media Network Mapping | New Media and Public Communication (ARC Discovery) | Crisis Communication | Twitter | Research Projects | Conferences | AoIR 2012 | ECREA 2012 |

It’s that time of the year again, when I set off for the usual end-of-year round of conferences – and this year has turned out to be an especially busy one. As I write this, I’m already in Toronto for the inaugural workshop of a Canadian-funded, multi-partner research project on Social Media and Campaigning which is led by Greg Elmer of Ryerson University; this comes at an interesting time, of course, with electioneering south of the border in full swing. We’re already tracking the Twitter performance of both campaigns’ key accounts – more on that as it develops.

My next …

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Snurb — Tuesday 14 September 2010 13:55

Coming Attractions

Travel | Produsers and Produsage | New Media and Public Communication (ARC Discovery) | Conferences |

It’s that time of the year again – I’m frantically working to get ready for my October overseas trip, which will take me through much of northern Europe. Here’s what’s on the agenda – if you’re in the neighbourhood, say hi (and connect with me on Dopplr to make catching up easier).

My first stop is in Berlin, where we’ve scheduled a couple of workshops for our Mapping Online Publics ARC Discovery team (involving my CCI colleague Jean Burgess as well as our partner researchers Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai from Sociomantic Labs). From there, I’m heading on to …

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Snurb — Saturday 1 May 2010 13:24

More Travel Coming Up: EDEM 2010

Politics | Travel | Government | e-Government | Produsage Communities | Produsers and Produsage | EDEM 2009 | EDEM 2010 |

In a few days' time, I'll head off to Europe again, to present at this year's Conference on e-Democracy (EDEM 2010). I really enjoyed the 2009 edition (see the coverage in this blog), and it's hard to believe a whole year has passed already - probably because it hasn't: EDEM 2009 was held in September...

Still, that's not stopped us from developing some new ideas on how to further the 'government 2.0' push which aims to utilise Web 2.0 technologies, social media models, and produsage processes in order to create better engagement and participation between governments and citizens. This year, I'm building on my observations with Jason Wilson about top-down and bottom-up forms of engagement, presented at EDEM 2009, to suggest (in a paper co-authored with Adam Swift) that neither the common government-to-citizen (g2c) nor citizen-to-citizen (c2c) initiatives in the government 2.0 space quite manage to find the right balance, and that we may need to explore the possibility for new, hybrid models in between these poles: we outline what we've called a g4c2c model in which government provides explicit support for, and gets involved in, citizen-to-citizen activities.

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Snurb — Sunday 30 August 2009 17:51

Off to Europe

Travel | e-Government | Produsers and Produsage | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Transforming Audiences 2009 | EDEM 2009 | Future of Journalism 2009 |

On Tuesday I'm heading off to Europe again, for a whirlwind tour of three conference in three countries within ten days. In combination, they provide a pretty good overview of my current research interests - I'll be presenting what is more or less an English-language version of my paper on prosumption and produsage from the Prosumer Revisited conference in March at a conference called Transforming Audiences in London; from there I'm heading to Vienna for the 2009 Conference on Electronic Democracy to present a paper co-authored with Gatewatching.org's Jason Wilson which discusses various developments in e-government and e-democracy in Australia (including the DBCDE government consultation blog trial and GetUp!'s Project Democracy); and finally I'm off to Cardiff for the Future of Journalism conference where I'm presenting the outcomes of my interviews with some of the principals behind Germany's successful community news platform myHeimat.de. (This Future of Journalism conference is not to be confused with the MEAA's somewhat lacklustre series of 'Future of Journalism' talkfests in Australia last year, incidentally...) Along the way, I guess I'll also take a little time off to celebrate my recent promotion to Associate Professor...

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Snurb — Friday 10 July 2009 13:58

Medical Makeover Tourism in South-East Asia

Travel | ANZCA 2009 |

Brisbane.


The final speaker in this session at ANZCA 2009 is Michael Galvin, who focusses on a number of trends related to medical tourism and makeover culture. There are now a number of operators offering package travel deals which offer makeover holidays that include tourism, beauty treatment, and cosmetic, elective, or even very serious surgery components - often offering trips to destinations like Malaysia where the costs for such procedures are substantially cheaper.

Websites advertising these services provide brochure-style information about the getaway hotels as well as the hospitals involved, and potential clients are positioned both as potential patient and potential tourist - packages offered include the 'mummy makeover', for example, and describe a fairytale makeover story. (The Singapore tourism board similarly has a special 'Singapore health' brochure.)

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