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Snurb — Tuesday 16 October 2012 20:15

Making 'Big Data' Manageable

'Big Data' | CCC 2012 |

The next speaker at the CCC Symposium is Rasmussen Helles, who takes us back to the problem of 'big data'. Such data lend themselves well to visualisation, but this also creates substantial new problems as we make sense of data through their visual representations: we may see the patterns in the data, but we still don't necessarily know what they mean.

To establish such media usually requires much more manual approaches of analysis, beyond (algorithmic) visualisation. This means content coding – a structured interpretation of data at a meaningful level, which cannot be done automatically at this point – …

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Snurb — Tuesday 16 October 2012 19:44

Towards Digital Space Analysis

Internet Technologies | CCC 2012 |

The next speaker at the CCC Symposium is Casper Radil, whose interest is in the analytical construction of Web data. How might we talk about the relationship between server access data and the actual communication processes which take place as users engage with the Websites themselves? Casper's approach is digital space analysis, which is an approach to contextualising the different forms of metadata which are created as users access Web content.

This also marks a shift from Web analytics, as a specific form, to digital analytics more broadly, which recognises that data about online practices now stem from a variety …

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Snurb — Tuesday 16 October 2012 18:47

Big (and Small) Data in Context

'Big Data' | Social Media | CCC 2012 |

The next speaker at the CCC symposium is the fabulous Nancy Baym, who begins by noting how overwhelming the buzz about 'big data' has become. There's a great deal of fascination just with the things we can do with big data sources - tracing interesting patterns, attempting to predict future processes, making sense of data by using algorithmic tools.

But the outcomes of such research often remain predictable: they show what we already knew (that various social factors influence each other, for example), and the close studies mean that wider context is often missed. Internet studies has always been very …

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Snurb — Tuesday 16 October 2012 18:15

Data, Metadata, Big Data?

'Big Data' | CCC 2012 |

I'm spending the day at the Centre for Communication and Computing at the University of Copenhagen, where Klaus Bruhn Jensen has brought together a bunch of AoIR folks, including myself, for a one-day symposium called "Digital Data - Lost, Found and Made". I'll be speaking about our Twitter research in the afternoon.

Klaus begins by noting that there are three degrees of media: humans as media, the mass media, and network media - and our understanding of media and their flows has changed considerably over the years. From the two-step flow model we've now moved to the three …

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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 — Saturday 15 September 2012 16:16

New Article on Twitter and Journalism in Australia

Politics | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | New Media and Public Communication (ARC Discovery) | Crisis Communication | Twitter | Publications | Conferences |

I’m please to say that a new article of mine has been published in Media International Australia (which means I’ve now had articles in consecutive MIA issues…). The issue in question, on “The ‘New’ News”, was edited by my QUT colleagues Stephen Harrington and Brian McNair, and looks like a bumper collection of exciting work – full details are here.

My article is on the use of Twitter by Australian journalists, looking especially at the Rudd/Gillard leadership spill in June 2010, and the federal election night in August. Below is the abstract – the full article is here …

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Snurb — Sunday 26 August 2012 13:06

Twitter and the Media: Methods, ATNIX, Citizen Journalism, and the Olympics

Produsers and Produsage | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Blogs and Blogging | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | New Media and Public Communication (ARC Discovery) | Twitter | Publications | Television |

Here are some more updates on my recent adventures in the world of Twitter research. First, I’m very happy to report that a new chapter on the impact of Twitter on the long-standing melée between industrial and citizen journalism has now been published. In the article, co-written with my CCI colleague Tim Highfield, we explore how the emergence of Twitter as a middle ground between the branded spaces of news Websites and citizen journalist blogs and other sites complicates the previously somewhat more obvious battle lines between the two sides – extending a process of, if not convergence then at …

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Snurb — Saturday 4 August 2012 18:02

Quick Round-Up of This Month's Activities

Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | New Media and Public Communication (ARC Discovery) | Twitter | Conferences |

I’m about to head back to Australia after a month of travel in Europe (mainly in Germany), where my colleagues and I have engaged in a range of workshops and conferences with our various research partners. Here’s an overview of the major presentations during that time.

In Bristol, I was an invited speaker at the first workshop of a new network of researchers exploring digital methods, and presented our work in the Mapping Online Publics project:

Axel Bruns. "Mapping Online Publics: Understanding the Role of Twitter in Public Communication." Invited plenary paper presented at the first NCRM Digital …

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Snurb — Sunday 1 July 2012 15:03

New Publications on Blogs and Twitter

Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Blogs and Blogging | Social Media | Social Media in Times of Crisis (ARC Linkage) | New Media and Public Communication (ARC Discovery) | Crisis Communication | Twitter | Publications | Conferences |

A couple more new publications before I head off overseas again (mainly for research workshops, but I’ll also take in the Digital Humanities conference in Hamburg and the Conference on Science and the Internet in Düsseldorf):

Tim Highfield and Axel Bruns. “Confrontation and Cooptation: A Brief History of Australian Political Blogs.” Media International Australia 143 (2012): 89-98.

This article in a special issue of Media International Australia on the history of the Internet in Australia, edited by Gerard Goggin and Jock Given, reviews the development of the Australian political blogosphere, from the earlier ‘blog wars’ especially around the …

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Snurb — Thursday 31 May 2012 14:39

New Work on the Australian Twittersphere, and on Produsage

Produsers and Produsage | Produsage in Business | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | New Media and Public Communication (ARC Discovery) | Twitter | Conferences |

Phew – it’s been a busy month since my last update. Here’s a run-down of the latest news. First, the emerging maps of the Australian Twittersphere which I presented at the Digital Humanities Australasia conference in Canberra in March have received quite a bit of press coverage over the past week or so, following our press release about this work. Here are some of the highlights:

  • The Australian ran a big page three article about our research, and reprinted the annotated map itself;
  • the Australian Financial Review also printed the map on page three;
  • Stilgherrian gave us a great write-up …
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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Books, Papers, Articles

Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Opinion and Press

Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Creative Work

Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Lecture Series


Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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Queensland University of Technology (QUT) profile

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