A Mid-Year Update of Recent Publications

I’ve continued to update my lists of publications and presentations over the past months, but I think it’s time to do another quick round-up of recent work before all the new projects start in earnest.

First off, my colleagues Darryl Woodford, Troy Sadkowsky and I have been making some good progress developing further methodological approaches to Twitter research – focussing this time especially on examining how accounts gain their followers (for some of the outcomes from that research, also see our coverage at Mapping Online Publics):

Axel Bruns, Darryl Woodford, and Troy Sadkowsky. “Towards a Methodology for Examining Twitter Follower Accession.” First Monday 19.4 (2014).

Axel Bruns and Darryl Woodford. “Identifying the Events That Connect Social Media Users: Charting Follower Accession on Twitter.” In SAGE Research Methods Cases. London: Sage, 2013.

More generally, I’ve also been involved in a couple of related publications led by Stefan Stieglitz from the University of Münster (one in English,  one in German) which highlight the contribution which the emerging field of social media analytics will be able to make to the disciplines of business informatics and information systems:

Stefan Stieglitz, Linh Dang-Xuan, Axel Bruns, and Christoph Neuberger. “Social Media Analytics: An Interdisciplinary Approach and Its Implications for Information Systems.” Business & Information Systems Engineering 6.2 (2014): 89-96.

Stefan Stieglitz, Linh Dang-Xuan, Axel Bruns, and Christoph Neuberger. “Social Media Analytics: Ein interdisziplinärer Ansatz und seine Implikationen für die Wirtschaftsinformatik.” Wirtschaftsinformatik 56.2 (2014): 101-109.

And as such approaches become more mainstream in scholarly research, we’ve also got to ensure that our frameworks for presenting the outcomes of that work are able to keep up. I’ve had a chance to reflect on these challenges in a special issue of First Monday which was led by Klaus Bruhn Jensen towards the end of last year:

Axel Bruns. “Faster than the Speed of Print: Reconciling ‘Big Data’ Social Media Analysis and Academic Scholarship.” First Monday 18.10 (2013). DOI: 10.5210/fm.v18i10.4879.

I was also lucky enough to be invited to contribute another reflective piece to help launch the inaugural issue of the new Journal of Media Innovations,  edited by Charles Ess at the University of Oslo. Here, I’m picking my way through the connections between innovations by the media as well as by users, and their overall impact on society as such:

Axel Bruns. “Media Innovations, User Innovations, Societal Innovations.” Journal of Media Innovations 1.1 (2014): 13-27.

But of course there’s also a great deal of continuing research on a number of key themes I’ve addressed in recent time. I may not have written much on the topic, as our social media research has consumed most of my time, but I was delighted to be invited to contribute an outline of the differences between prosumption and produsage to Ruth Towse and Christian Handke’s comprehensive Handbook on the Digital Creative Economy:

Axel Bruns. “From Prosumption to Produsage.” In Ruth Towse and Christian Handke, eds., Handbook on the Digital Creative Economy. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2013. 67-78.

Similarly, my interest in the intersections between professional journalism and user-led engagement with the news continues still, and led to a couple more articles that draw on our continuing work on the Australian Twitter News Index, and our study of social media activities during the Arab Spring:

Axel Bruns, Tim Highfield, and Stephen Harrington. “Sharing the News: Dissemination of Links to Australian News Sites on Twitter.” In Janey Gordon, Paul Rowinski, and Gavin Stewart, eds., Br(e)aking the News: Journalism, Politics and New Media. New York: Peter Lang, 2013. 181-210.

Axel Bruns, Tim Highfield, and Jean Burgess. “The Arab Spring and Its Social Media Audiences: English and Arabic Twitter Users and Their Networks.” In Martha McCaughey, ed., Cyberactivism on the Participatory Web. New York: Routledge, 2014. 86-116.

Taking a detour from these largely data-driven investigations, my colleague Theresa Sauter and I also published a first report on the way that social media are references in Australian political journalism. Working with colleagues in Norway and the U.S.,  there will be another stage of this work soon:

Theresa Sauter and Axel Bruns. "Social Media in the Media: How Australian Media Perceive Social Media as Political Tools." Brisbane: ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, 2013.

The other major research area we’re continuing to address is the use of social media for crisis communication. I’ve been able to contribute some of my thoughts on this to a couple of major handbooks and reference works, and I was also delighted to be asked for a contribution to the 2013 edition of an influential report prepared by the German state media agencies:

Axel Bruns. “Crisis Communication.” In Stuart Cunningham and Sue Turnbull, eds., The Media and Communications in Australia. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 2014. 351-355.

Axel Bruns. “Social Media and Journalism during Times of Crisis.” In Jeremy Hunsinger and Theresa Senft, eds., The Social Media Handbook. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Axel Bruns. “Soziale Medien in Krisensituationen.” In Jürgen Brautmeier and Thomas Fuchs, eds., Programmbericht 2013: Fernsehen in Deutschland - Programmforschung und Programmdiskurs. Berlin: Vistas Verlag. 163-166.

Finally, my other major publication in recent months was the Twitter and Society collection which I edited with colleagues in Australia and Germany. On this site, I’ve now also made available the chapters I’ve been involved in here:

Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann. “Twitter and Society: An Introduction.” In Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann, eds. Twitter and Society. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. xxix-xxxviii.

Axel Bruns and Hallvard Moe. “Structural Layers of Communication on Twitter.” In Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann, eds. Twitter and Society. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 15-28.

Axel Bruns and Stefan Stieglitz. “Metrics for Understanding Communication on Twitter.” In Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann, eds. Twitter and Society. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 69-82.

Axel Bruns, Katrin Weller, and Stephen Harrington. “Twitter and Sports: Football Fandom in Emerging and Established Markets.” In Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann, eds. Twitter and Society. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 263-280.

Axel Bruns and Jean Burgess. “Crisis Communication in Natural Disasters: The Queensland Floods and Christchurch Earthquakes.” In Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann, eds. Twitter and Society. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 373-384.

Cornelius Puschmann, Axel Bruns, Merja Mahrt, Katrin Weller, and Jean Burgess. “Epilogue: Why Study Twitter?” In Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann, eds. Twitter and Society. New York: Peter Lang, 2014. 425-432.

Enough for now, I think – but plenty more coming out soon…