Social Media Network Mapping

My twelve weeks as a Mercator Fellow at the Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung (ZeMKI) in Bremen are almost over already: I'll soon travel to Cape Town for the annual International Communication Association conference (more on this soon). I've had a great time here, and met some wonderful colleagues; the time has passed all too quickly.

My time in Bremen started with a presentation in the ComAI Lecture series at the Bremen Press Club, and I'm pleased to report that the video of the talk is now also available on the ZeMKI YouTube channel. The channel also has many …

A couple of months ago, I presented a critique of the concept of  'the' public sphere at the 2026 Digital Media Research Centre Summer School in Brisbane. Like the other talks in that segment of the Summer School programme, the team producing our DMRC podcast Read Them Sideways has now also published a recording of that talk for your listening pleasure, so here it is:

I think the podcast works fine by itself; since some of the presentation was fairly visual, though, if you'd like to flick through the slides while you listen I've embedded them below as well. And …

After the excitement of the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library last week I have now arrived at the Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen, where I’ll spend the next couple of months as a Mercator Fellow. 

There will be a handful of side trips to other colleagues across Europe from here as well, though; in fact, I’ll begin the coming week with two days at GESIS, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, in Cologne, where I’ll also give a public lecture on our practice mapping approach as …

As I write this I'm just about to head off to Germany for a keynote at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library, followed by a three-month stay as a Mercator Fellow at the fabulous Centre for Media, Communication, and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen, thanks to the Communicative AI Research Unit. That stay will also enable me to visit a number of other colleagues and collaborators along the way, including at GESIS in Köln, the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, the University of Münster, the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, LMU München, and …