It's mid-February already, which means that here at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre we've just concluded another very engaging DMRC Summer School, with participants from around the world – many thanks to everyone who joined us for this.

One of the new segments in the programme this year was a session on 'Re-Thinking Media for the Platform Age', with several contributions from DMRC research leaders on current topics of interest. In my own talk for this, I revisited the idea of the public sphere once again, continuing a thought process that spans from my Information Policy article in …

The second panel at the AANZCA 2025 conference today is on digital campaigning in the 2025 Australian federal election, and starts with my QUT colleague Sam Vilkins presenting our attempts to track social media activities throughout the election. For this we focussed on the period from the issue of election writs to the day before the election itself.

Tracking digital campaigning has become a great deal more difficult, in part due to the changes to the overall social media landscape with the enxittification of Twitter and the aging of Facebook, as well as the rise of various other alternative platforms …

I’m also the first speaker in the next session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting our work in progress on mapping public conversations about climate change within Australian Facebook pages between 2018 and 2024. Here is an earlier versions of the slides, from my AoIR 2025 preconference keynote:

I was the final speaker in this first paper session at the AANZCA 2025 conference, presenting a longitudinal study of ten years of the #auspol hashtag on what was then still Twitter. Our central interest here, in particular, was whether the extremely active #auspol userbase could be considered a genuine online community, or was merely a group of political junkies all shouting voluminously into the void.

Our slides are below: