After the excitement of the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library last week I have now arrived at the Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen, where I’ll spend the next couple of months as a Mercator Fellow.
There will be a handful of side trips to other colleagues across Europe from here as well, though; in fact, I’ll begin the coming week with two days at GESIS, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, in Cologne, where I’ll also give a public lecture on our practice mapping approach as a too in the study of destructive polarisation. The talk will begin on Monday 30 March 2026 at 14:30 CEST (22:30 AEST), and will be livestreamed on Zoom – please join us if you’re interested.
And back in Bremen, in the following week I’ll present a new talk as part of ZeMKI’s ComAI lecture series. On 7 April at 18:30 CEST, I’ll discuss my current thinking about ‘the’ public sphere and how it has been reshaped or indeed replaced, in part also through the algorithmic and AI-driven interventions we have seen in recent years (and which are of particular interest to the Communicative AI Research Unit); this is a topic which I hope to explore in greater detail while I’m here as a Mercator Fellow. Not sure yet if there will be a livestream, but the talk will be recorded for the ZeMKI YouTube channel. And if you’re in the neighbourhood, join us at the Bremer Presse-Club.
In fact, this is my second talk in the ComAI series – I also spoke about our then still very rudimentary use of AI tools in research during my visit to ZeMKI in April 2024. That recording is online, and I’ve just added it to the page for the talk.
Here are the abstracts for the two talks:
Exploring Destructive Polarisation: A Practice Mapping Approach to Social Media Debate about the Voice Referendum in Australia
Raum Ost, GESIS, Unter Sachsenhausen, Cologne, 14:30 CEST, 30 Mar. 2026
Social network analysis is a key tool in communication research, where it is often used to identify the discursive alliances and antagonisms that indicate polarisation between participants. However, it struggles in analysing activity patterns on communication platforms that provide few data points on interactions between actors (e.g. Facebook or Instagram), and in exploring the interconnections between multiple activity practices that are interwoven with each other. This talk introduces the new approach of practice mapping, which advances beyond the network analysis and visualisation of direct interactions between accounts and instead uses vector embeddings of networked actions and interactions to map the commonalities and disjunctures in the practices of social media users. In particular, this innovative methodological framework has the potential to incorporate multiple distinct modes of activity and interactivity into a single practice map, can be further enriched with account-level attributes such as information gleaned from textual analysis, profile information, available demographic details, and other features, and can be applied even to a cross-platform analysis of communicative patterns and practices. Drawing on a case study of public posting activity on Facebook during the Voice to Parliament referendum campaign in Australia, this talk outlines the practice mapping approach and demonstrates the insights into patterns of destructive polarisation between individuals and groups that it can produce.
Revisiting ‘the’ Public Sphere and Its Algorithmically Shaped Publics
Bremer Presse-Club, Schnoor 27, Bremen, 18:30 CEST, 7 Apr. 2026
‘The’ public sphere is now irretrievably fractured into a multiplicity of online and offline, larger and smaller, more or less public spaces that frequently (and often serendipitously) overlap and intersect with one another, and that are increasingly shaped by algorithmic interventions. This diverse array of what have been described variously as public spheres, public spherules, platform publics, issue publics, or personal publics nonetheless serves many of the same functions that were postulated for the public sphere itself. However, while the communicative structures, functions, and dynamics of many such spaces have been studied in isolation, we still lack a more comprehensive model that connects such case studies in pursuit of an overarching perspective. This talk identifies the crucial building blocks that help us conceptualise and investigate how the network of such spaces is structured, and in turn structures our everyday experience of public communication.
