A Final 2012 Publications Round-Up

As we’re hurtling down the last few hours towards 2013, it seems like a good idea to take stock of what was an incredibly busy 2012. Here, then, is a round-up of all (I think) of my publications and presentations for the year, organised into loose thematic categories. In all, and with my various collaborators from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation and beyond, I seem to have generated some 4 book chapters, 12 journal articles, 22 conference presentations and one major report – and that’s not counting various articles in The Guardian, The Conversation, and other media outlets. There’s also a few more articles still in the pipeline – but given today’s date, I suspect they’ll end up counting towards 2013 rather than 2012…

Social Media Research Methods

One major component of our Mapping Online Publics work for this year has been the further development of our social media research approaches, especially as far as Twitter research is concerned. A number of my publications have dealt with the practical aspects of this work:

Axel Bruns and Stefan Stieglitz. “Quantitative Approaches to Comparing Communication Patterns on Twitter.” Journal of Technology in Human Services 30.3-4 (2012): 160-185. DOI: 10.1080/15228835.2012.744249.

Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess. "Notes towards the Scientific Study of Public Communication on Twitter." Keynote presented at the Conference on Science and the Internet, Düsseldorf, 4 Aug. 2012. (presentation video, slides and audio)

Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess. “Researching News Discussion on Twitter: New Methodologies.” Journalism Studies 13.5-6 (2012): 801-14. DOI: 10.1080/1461670X.2012.664428.

Axel Bruns and Eugene Liang Yuxian. “Tools and Methods for Capturing Twitter Data during Natural Disasters.” First Monday 17.4 (2012).

Axel Bruns. "How Long Is a Tweet? Mapping Dynamic Conversation Networks on Twitter Using Gawk and Gephi." Information, Communication & Society 15.9 (2012). 1323-1351.

Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Lars Kirchhoff, and Thomas Nicolai. "Mapping the Australian Twittersphere." Paper presented at Digital Humanities Australasia, Canberra, 30 Mar. 2012.

Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess. “Doing Blog Research.” In James Arthur et al., eds., Research Methods & Methodologies in Education. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2012.

Additionally, some of our papers also dealt with the implications of working with the proprietary Application Programming Interface offered by Twitter, a company with increasingly restrictive rules for what may be done with its data. There will be more to come on this topic, I’m afraid:

Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. “Twitter Archives and the Challenges of ‘Big Social Data’ for Media and Communication Research.” M/C Journal 15.5 (2012).

Cornelius Puschmann, Jean Burgess, Axel Bruns, and Merja Mahrt. "Data Access, Ownership and Control in Social Web Services: Issues for Twitter Research." Paper presented at International Communication Conference conference, Phoenix, 26 May 2012.

And a number of my conference presentations and keynotes presented an overview of our social media research to date, against the backdrop of the rise of ‘big data’:

Axel Bruns. “Making Sense of Twitter: New Research Methods in the Digital Humanities.” Paper presented at the UQ Digital Humanities Symposium, Brisbane, 2 Nov. 2012.

Axel Bruns. “Social Media, Big Data, and the Public Sphere.” Paper presented at the European Communication Conference (ECREA), Istanbul, 25 Oct. 2012.

Axel Bruns. “Twitter, Big Data, and the Search for Meaning: Methodology in Progress.” Paper presented at the Centre for Communication and Computing Symposium “Digital Data – Lost, Found, and Made”, Copenhagen, 16 Oct. 2012.

Axel Bruns. "Towards a Comprehensive Picture of the Australian Twittersphere." Plenary paper presented at the workshop Methodeninnovationen in der Internetforschung, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München, 12 July 2012.

Axel Bruns. "Mapping Online Publics: Understanding the Role of Twitter in Public Communication." Invited plenary paper presented at the first NCRM Digital Methods as Mainstream Methodology workshop, University of the West of England, Bristol, 9 July 2012.

Axel Bruns. "Social Media as Part of the Wider Mediasphere." Keynote presented at Australian Teachers of Media (Queensland) conference, Brisbane, 27 May 2012.

Twitter and the Media

Additionally, much of our research work has been focussed on a range of specific applications of social media across particular fields of practice. One rapidly developing area of interest in this context has been the intersection between social and mainstream media, which I’ve explored especially with my CCI colleagues Tim Highfield and Stephen Harrington (as well as in my ATNIX series):

Axel Bruns, Tim Highfield, and Stephen Harrington. "Sharing the News: Dissemination of Links to Australian News Sites on Twitter." Paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Salford, 20 Oct 2012.

Axel Bruns, Tim Highfield, and Stephen Harrington. "#Eurovision: Twitter as a Technology of Fandom." Paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Salford, 20 Oct 2012.

Tim Highfield, Axel Bruns, and Stephen Harrington. “Tweeting le Tour: Connecting the Tour de France’s Global Audience through Twitter.” Paper presented at the European Communication Conference (ECREA), Istanbul, 26 Oct. 2012.

Stephen Harrington, Tim Highfield and Axel Bruns. “More than a Backchannel: Twitter and Television.” In José Manuel Noguera, ed., Audience Interactivity and Participation. Brussels: COST Action Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies, 2012. 13-17.

Politics and Journalism

Some of this work also plays into my long-standing research interest in the impact of social and collaborative media forms on journalistic practices and the journalism industry, of course. Here, we’ve continued especially to track developments in Australia, both in general and around the 2012 Queensland state election:

Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, and Tim Highfield. “Political Networks on Twitter: Tweeting the Queensland State Election.” Paper presented at the European Communication Conference (ECREA), Istanbul, 26 Oct. 2012.

Tim Highfield, Axel Bruns, and Stephen Harrington. “#auspol, #qldpol, and #wapol: Twitter and the New Australian Political Commentariat.” Paper presented at the Association of Internet Researchers conference, Salford, 21 Oct. 2012.

Axel Bruns. “A Chance for Diversity? Australian Online Journalism.” In Eugenia Siapera and Andreas Veglis, eds., The Handbook of Global Online Journalism. London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 412-428.

Axel Bruns. "Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, Real-Time Feedback: New Challenges for Journalism." Guest lecture presented at the University of Helsinki, 11 Oct. 2012.

Axel Bruns and Tim Highfield. “Blogs, Twitter, and Breaking News: The Produsage of Citizen Journalism.” In Rebecca Ann Lind, ed., Produsing Theory in a Digital World: The Intersection of Audiences and Production. New York: Peter Lang, 2012. 15-32.

Axel Bruns. “Journalists and Twitter: How Australian News Organisations Adapt to a New Medium.” Media International Australia 144 (2012): 97-107.

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

Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. “(Not) the Twitter Election: The Dynamics of the #ausvotes Conversation in Relation to the Australian Media Ecology.” Journalism Practice 6.3 (2012): 384-402. DOI: 10.1080/17512786.2012.663610.

Crisis Communication

Another major research area for my colleagues and me has been the use of social media in crisis communication, following our own experience with Twitter in the 2011 south east Queensland floods and in the subsequent crisis events of 2011 and 2012. We also won an ARC Linkage grant in this area, which (after some delays) will get started properly in 2013 – so expect plenty more work from us on this topic:

Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Kate Crawford, and Frances Shaw. "#qldfloods and @QPSMedia: Crisis Communication on Twitter in the 2011 South East Queensland Floods." Brisbane: ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, 2012.

Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess. “Local and Global Responses to Disaster: #eqnz and the Christchurch Earthquake.” Paper presented at the Australia New Zealand Disaster & Emergency Management Conference, Brisbane, 18 Apr. 2012. (presentation slides and audio)

Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess. “Analysing Twitter Activity in Crisis Contexts.” Paper presented at the European Communication Conference (ECREA), Istanbul, 26 Oct. 2012.

Axel Bruns. "Social Media and Crisis Communication." Guest lecture presented at the University of Helsinki, 12 Oct. 2012.

Frances Shaw, Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. “Patterns of Talk on Twitter during the Queensland Floods.” Paper presented at the Talk about Disasters workshop, Griffith University, Brisbane, 25 June 2012.

Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess. “Twitter and the Queensland Floods.” Paper presented at the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association conference, Brisbane, 23 Apr. 2012.

Axel Bruns. “Twitter and Disasters.” / “Twitter in the 2011 Queensland Floods (and Beyond).” Papers presented in a post-conference workshop at the Disaster Resilient Communities 2012 conference, Melbourne, 19 Apr. 2012.

Axel Bruns. “Towards Distributed Citizen Participation: Lessons from WikiLeaks and the Queensland Floods.” JeDEM: e-Journal of e-Democracy and Open Government 4.2 (2012): 142-159.

Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, and Tim Highfield. "Inter and Intra-Language Engagement on Twitter in Arab Spring Hashtag Communities." Paper presented at The Arab Spring: A Symposium on Social Media and the Politics of Reportage, Melbourne, 8 June 2012.

Produsage

My research into the practices of produsage has been somewhat overshadowed by our social media research, I’m afraid. There’s only a handful of publications in 2012 which centrally deal with produsage, therefore – but I did manage to edit a special issue of the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia with Jan Schmidt from the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg on this topic, so quite a few other authors have picked up the work where I left off:

Axel Bruns. “Reconciling Community and Commerce? Collaboration between Produsage Communities and Commercial Operators.” Information, Communication & Society 15.6 (2012): 815-835. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2012.680482.

Axel Bruns and Jan-Hinrik Schmidt. “Produsage: A Closer Look at Continuing Developments.” New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 17.1 (2012): 3-8. DOI: 10.1080/13614568.2011.563626.

Axel Bruns. “Ad Hoc Innovation by Users of Social Networks: The Case of Twitter.” Challenge Social Innovation conference, Vienna, 19-21 Sep. 2011. (presentation slides and audio) Also published as ZSI Discussion Paper 16 (2012).