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Oh noes, due to a very slow elevator I’ve come in late to the morning session at AoIR 2018, and have missed some of David Myles’s talk already. He studied online content from a range of Canadian pro-choice advocates that sought to reconstruct the fictional character of Anne of Green Gables as an abortion access activist and feminist icon; somewhat unsurprisingly this was attacked in turn by pro-life advocates.

These opponents criticised Anne’s positioning as a feminist icon, and considerable discursive struggles between the two sides emerged. Anne is often depicted as a young girl with unmistakeable agency, unusual …

The next speaker in this session at AoIR 2018 is Christian Strippel, whose focus is on the discourse architecture of German news Websites. The background to this work is a project to develop the tools to automatically detect and mitigate hate speech in comment sections in such sites.

Such hate speech is common in comments sections on such sites, and news publishers have a variety of mechanisms for addressing this, from netiquettes and forum rules through human moderators to automated moderation systems. The technical frameworks and affordances of such commenting spaces play a crucial role here as well, of course …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Miya Williams Fayne, whose focus is on the shift from the black press to broader black media. Early black press were mainly abolitionist newspapers, and were officially recognised by the National Newspapers Association. Today many black media are online and have diversified their areas of focus, and Miya conducted interviews with a number of the editors and operators of such media organisations.

The interviewees have a range of terms that categorise their outlets, including especially black press and black media, which are used largely interchangeably; some respondents distinguished between these terms …

The final panel on this day at AoIR 2018 is on journalism, and starts with Òscar Coromina. His focus is on the influence that trending topics on Twitter had on journalistic coverage of the Catalan independence referendum. Trending topics are important in directing user attention, especially in the context of breaking news, and Twitter is of course also selling advertising at the top of its trending topics list, indicating their importance.

Trending topics may be hashtags or phrases, and work in similar ways to enable the formation of ad hoc publics or algorithmically generated publics; they are technosocial actors in …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Ellis Jones, who focusses on the connections between context collapse and the imagined audience. Social media users navigate the challenge of context collapse by imagining an ideal audience for their content, and Ellis is exploring this especially in the context of DIY music content – but context collapse may also lead to the presence of an unimagined audience.

Offline, there has been a broad historical change in the boundary policing by DIY music scenes in the UK; this takes place in cooperatively run independent venues and creates a close-knit community while …

I missed most of the first talk in the post-lunch panel at AoIR 2018, but here we go with Sophie Bishop’s paper on sponsored content on YouTube, in the context of beauty vloggers. Fans of these vloggers generally understand that such content is often commercially sponsored and supported in some form; they are very active in policing vloggers’ behaviours, establishing appropriate boundaries of authenticity in this space.

Such boundary-setting takes place in a range of online fora away from YouTube itself; here, fans critique their influencers (sometimes quite harshly) and discuss the limitations and implications of commercial sponsorship …

The last paper in this AoIR 2018 session was mine, presenting on our TrISMA project to gather social media data in Australia at scale. Here are the slides:

The third speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Harsh Taneja, who promises to present an alternative history of big data. At present, many big data datasets are highly platform-specific, such data can generally be accessed via platform APIs or scraped from platform Websites. But big data research existed before the Internet: Harsh points here to the early days of advertising-supported broadcasting, when advertisers first required audience measurements.

This was done at first through self-reporting, for instance through phone surveys. Soon, however, people like Arthur C. Nielsen developed audience measurement devices, which produced a first kind of big data on …

The next speaker in our AoIR 2018 session is Ericka Menchen-Trevino, whose research interest is on the study of selective exposure; this is often studied through surveys or lab experiments, but can be usefully complemented with Web history data. Such an integration between conventional social science data and digital trace data provides a blueprint for new possibilities across a range of research interests, in fact.

Conventional social science broadly distinguishes between quantitative and qualitative data and methods, but this distinction is not particular useful when working with digital trace data. These data are usually collected by the researcher for a …

I’ve spent the morning in an AoIR Executive meeting, but I’m back for the second session on this Friday morning at AoIR 2018 – and I also have a paper in this session. First off is Rasmus Helles, though, who presents the People’s Internet Project: a major global study, supported by the Carlsberg Foundation, that seeks to map out global variations in Internet development.

This takes the citizen as a point of departure, and employs a range of methods for studying Internet use: it uses big data on Web traffic from ComScore; engages in local ethnographies of Internet users; conducts …