Some New Publications

It’s been some time since I last posted an update on my latest publications – though you may have seen that on the front page of this site, I’ve updated the banner of the most recent books I’ve been featured in, at last. There is quite a lot more work in the pipeline for the immediate future, including a major new collection which I’ve edited with colleagues in Norway and Sweden – more on that soon.

For now, though, you wouldn’t go wrong if you started by checking out the new journal Social Media + Society, which I’m delighted to be involved in as a member of the Editorial Board. We launched issue 1.1 with a collection of brief manifesto pieces that outline why the study of social media and their impacts on society is so important, featuring many leading researchers in this emerging field. And what’s more, the whole journal is open access! For what it’s worth, here’s my contribution:

Axel Bruns. “Making Sense of Society through Social Media.” Social Media + Society 1.1 (2015). DOI: 10.1177/2056305115578679.

Along similar lines, my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues and I have also continued our critical engagement with social media and ‘big data’ research methods and approaches, which has resulted in two new book chapters recently.

Jean Burgess and Axel Bruns. “Easy Data, Hard Data: The Politics and Pragmatics of Twitter Research after the Computational Turn.” In Ganaele Langlois, Joanna Redden, and Greg Elmer, eds., Compromised Data: From Social Media to Big Data. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. 93-111.

Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, and Tim Highfield. “A ‘Big Data’ Approach to Mapping the Australian Twittersphere.” In Paul Longley Arthur and Katherine Bode, eds., Advancing Digital Humanities: Research, Methods, Theories. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. 113-129.

The latter of these also provides the latest in-depth update on our continuing efforts to map the entire Australian Twittersphere – though I hope to share some more news on this ongoing project over the coming months.

I’m now also increasingly returning to questions of gatekeeping, gatewatching, and news curation in journalistic and quasi-journalistic contexts. Two new book chapters – one of them co-authored with my QUT colleague Tim Highfield – review where we’ve come from since the emergence of citizen journalism in the late 1990s, and explore how current social media practices fit into this picture. Through this work I’m gradually gearing up for some further longer-form writing about these issues – expect more in 2016.

Axel Bruns and Tim Highfield. “From News Blogs to News on Twitter: Gatewatching and Collaborative News Curation.” In Stephen Coleman and Deen Freelon, eds., Handbook of Digital Politics. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2015. 325-339.

Axel Bruns. “Working the Story: Social Media as a Second Wave of Citizen Journalism.” In Chris Atton, ed., The Routledge Companion to Alternative and Community Media. London: Routledge, 2015. 379-388.

Finally, the wildcard publication – though not at all unrelated to some of the work on social media and sports which I’ve done in the past – is a new publication with my PhD student Portia Vann and Hypometer founder Darryl Woodford which examines the adoption of social media as fan engagement tools by minor sporting codes. (And on that note, congrats to the Australian netball team for winning the World Championships yet again!)

Portia Vann, Darryl Woodford, and Axel Bruns. “Social Media and Niche Sports: The Netball ANZ Championship and Commonwealth Games on Twitter.” Media International Australia 155 (2015): 108-119.