Mapping Out the Next Few Months

Following on from my previous post, here’s an overview of what’s to come. And there’s quite a bit: on Saturday, I’m heading off to Europe again for a series of conferences and research workshops – many of them related to our social media research work at Mapping Online Publics.

First, my colleagues Jean Burgess, Tanya Nitins, and I will spend a week or so at the University of Münster to work with our ATN-DAAD project partner Stefan Stieglitz and his team; we’re collaborating on a project which examines the use of Twitter for brand management. The project will examine how brands perform on Twitter, and how they deal with negative perceptions and other emerging issues; it’s still in its formative stages, so expect to find out more as we get going properly!

From there, Jean and I head on to the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) conference in Reykjavik – a massive event, by all accounts; apparently there will be some 2500 delegates all up (hope there’s enough hotel rooms). We’re presenting a paper which examines the role of Twitter hashtags for the formation of ad hoc political issue publics: “The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics.” You’ll be able to follow my liveblogging from the conference here on the blog, of course.

After ECPR, I head back to mainland Europe for a few days in Amsterdam, where I’ll be visiting Richard Rogers of Govcom.org (which runs the IssueCrawler research tool). I’m very fond of Richard’s call for the development of digitally native research methodologies for the study of online content, and our MOP project is very much in line with these aims, so I’m looking forward to catching up with him. I’m also going to present a guest lecture on our own work at the University of Amsterdam.

My next stop is the Future of Journalism conference at the University of Cardiff, which I attended a few years ago. Here, Jean and I are presenting a paper on the uses of our new methodologies for researching hashtag-based user interactions on Twitter, “New Methodologies for Researching News Discussion on Twitter”, which I’ve already made available here. Especially given the recent voicemail hacking scandal in Britain, this should be a very interesting event, which I’ll also be liveblogging here.

Our next stop is the University of Düsseldorf, where we’ll join our QUT colleague Stephen Harrington for our second ATN-DAAD workshop with Katrin Weller and Cornelius Puschmann and their colleagues from the Junior Researchers Group “Science and the Internet”, following on from Katrin’s and Cornelius’s very productive visit to QUT during June and our public workshop The World According to Twitter. They’re also organising another public event, the Düsseldorf Workshop on Interdisciplinary Approaches to Twitter Analysis (DIATA11), which looks set to be joined by a veritable who’s who of European social network researchers. Can’t wait!

And if that wasn’t enough, I’ve also been invited to present at the Challenge Social Innovation conference in Vienna in mid-September. Here, I’ll discuss user-led innovation on Twitter, and the difficulties which users and third-party developers (as well as researchers) face in an environment which they’ve considerably helped to build and popularise, but whose fundamental technological frameworks ultimately remain outside of their control. My draft paper for the conference, “Ad Hoc Innovation by Users of Social Networks: The Case of Twitter” is already online here – and again, I’ll also be liveblogging the conference.

And that, finally, is it for this trip. I’ll be back in Australia towards the end of September – only to head off again soon for workshops and conferences in Taipei, Seattle, Berlin, and Rio de Janeiro. But that’s a post for another day…