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Finally, we move on to Andra Siibak in this AoIR 2012 panel. She highlights the potential of creative research methods for the study of social media: here, participants are asked to create something symbolic or metaphorical to represent their responses to research questions, and to reflect on these creations. Andra has used this to examine the online identity construction strategies of tweens in Estonia and Sweden.

The kids were asked to draw an imaginary character at ages 10 and 12-14, discussing inter alia what kinds of social media platforms this character may use; later, they were also asked to create …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2012 panel is Niels Brügger, who steps back from online social networks to present some more general observations about network analysis. His specific interest is in Web historiography – how can network analysis be applied to archival Web material, then?

Software-supported network analysis builds on hyperlinks on the Web – not on the wider context of Web content production. But hyperlinks always have a meaning; they are made for a reason, and constitute a performative entity which enables movement from one document to another. Web archives complicate such meaning as they cannot normally constitute …

The next speaker on this AoIR 2012 panel is Frauke Zeller, who continues the focus on mixed-methods approaches to online social network analysis. This methodological paradigm is still quite new, and there is considerable uncertainty about best practices in research; network analysis alone cannot be enough.

Frauke specifically highlights the multimodality of social network content, which complicates analysis, and notes issues with the availability and verifiability of content as well. Further, are social networks a tool for research, or an object of study?

Facebook research themes include the questions of who is using Facebook, what users do on Facebook …

The final session at AoIR 2012 this evening is a panel on online social network analysis. Jakob Linaa Jensen starts us off by reflecting on the methods for studying online social networks, and notes the importance of both tracking social media use in practice and asking users about their uses. Jakob also draws a distinction between social media and social networks, where social media are spaces where users can create profiles and share content, and social networks are a smaller subset which is focussed centrally on the user and their networking activities, less on content.

Online social networks are also …

The final speaker in this panel at AoIR 2012 is Delia Dumitrica, whose interest is in how citizens conceptualise the use of social media in political communication. Her premise is that this can be understood as an attempt to discursively articulate wider issues of trust in politicians. Articulations mobilise people, and tell us something about what we expect of politics; young people, for example, long for democracy and want to be heard – they are far from disengaged (but misplaced faith in the role of technology in communication with politics can also disappoint).

Inn the recent Calgary mayoral campaign, candidate …

The second presenter in this session at AoIR 2012 is Sander Schwartz, who shifts our attention to the use of social media during the 2011 Danish election. His project drew on a panel of 6,000 volunteers whose Internet use was monitored, as well as on a survey of some 2,000 respondents from this group. The panel was representative of the wider Danish population; the survey group was self-selecting.

Denmark is interesting because it shows high levels of voter turnout (at over 80% on average), while support for traditional parliamentary politics is declining. Facebook is strong in Denmark, with a penetration …

The next session at AoIR 2012 begins with a paper presented by Julian Ausserhofer and Axel Maireder about national politics on Twitter, in the case of Austria. Twitter is now being used by a range of political actors in the country, including journalists and politicians, who are at times publicly interacting with one another using the platform. Many users also link to news media materials, of course.

Twitter communication is public by default; there is a low threshold to communication and Twitter is very open to participation. At the same time, the question is whether this leads to a …

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Jenny Korn, whose focus is on the #FuckProp8 hashtag which emerged around the Californian referendum to ban gay marriage, known as Proposition 8. The success of this referendum was a surprise to many Californians themselves, and resulted in a substantial amount of pushback, in the form of the hashtag (and its alternative #rejectprop8).

This is an event-based process of community formation which leads to a gradually strengthening cohesion of community activities that generates impact and finally results in stasis. In this, overlapping virtual and physical communities are embodied in a wider imagined community …

The next speaker at AoIR 2012 is Emilie Lucchesi, whose focus is on a controversy around southern US style TV chef Paula Deen. Deen announced in January that she had diabetes, and will be a spokesperson for a diabetic drug. Even while she knew about her condition she continued to cook very butter-heavy cuisine, however. (More than 100 million Americans now have diabetes or are prediabetic.)

Deen's announcements were followed by a barrage of critical, mocking online content – photoshopped images of Deen which criticised her for her food and unhealthy lifestyle. Deen herself slimmed down quickly and better manages …