Wrapping Up the Year with Some More Publications, and New Projects

Time for a quick update again: I’m hardly even back from the SBPJor conference in Rio de Janeiro in November, but my keynote “Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, Real-Time Feedback: New Challenges for Journalism” from the conference has already been published in the Brazilian Journalism Research journal, alongside the other keynotes. I posted the slides and audio from the presentation last month – and a similar presentation in German, from my visit to Vienna in March, is also online here.

When I arrived back in my office from the Rio trip, I was also very pleased to see that the Digital Difference book, collecting papers from the 2007 Ideas, Cyberspace, Education 3 conference on the shores of Loch Lomond, had finally arrived. It’s been a long road, but congratulations to the editors, Ray Land and Siân Bayne, for sticking with the project. My article, “Beyond Difference: Reconfiguring Education for the User-Led Age”, applies produsage concepts to explore new approaches to education.

There are also a couple of new journal articles coming out of our Mapping Online Publics project: I’ve converted my exploration of dynamic @reply network mapping methods (detailed in a series of blog posts starting here) into an article in Information, Communication & Society: “How Long Is a Tweet? Mapping Dynamic Conversation Networks on Twitter Using Gawk and Gephi.” In the article as well as in the original blog posts, I’m using the 2010 Rudd/Gillard Australian Labor Party leadership spill – #spill on Twitter – as a case study.

Also, the detailed examination of how the subsequent Australian federal election at the end of August 2010 played out on Twitter (under the #ausvotes hashtag) which I conducted with my CCI colleague Jean Burgess, based on a series of blog posts starting here and presented at the InASA conference in Sydney almost exactly a year ago, has just come out in a special issue of Communication, Politics & Culture, as “#ausvotes: How Twitter Covered the 2010 Australian Federal Election.”

And finally, building on the crisis communication research which has become such a large part of our work in the Mapping Online Publics project, I’m very pleased to say that we (in addition to me, ‘we’ is my QUT colleagues Jean Burgess and Terry Flew as well as Kate Crawford from the University of New South Wales) have been awarded ARC Linkage funding for a new project on social media and crisis communication, starting in early 2012. Our industry partners are the Queensland Department of Community Safety and the Eidos Institute. There’s a first post about it on the MOP site, as well as a news release from QUT. Oh, and (then) federal research Minister Kim Carr also put out a press release about it. More as we get started on the project!

Finally, though, a quick request: as you do your last-minute shopping for Christmas, could you let my PhD student Barbara Gligorijevic know how you use online product reviews to decide on what digital technology products to buy? Barbara is currently running an online survey, and would love to get a few more responses. Please pass on the URL to your friends and family, too: http://bit.ly/qutsurvey. Thanks!