My twelve weeks as a Mercator Fellow at the Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung (ZeMKI) in Bremen are almost over already: I'll soon travel to Cape Town for the annual International Communication Association conference (more on this soon). I've had a great time here, and met some wonderful colleagues; the time has passed all too quickly.
My time in Bremen started with a presentation in the ComAI Lecture series at the Bremen Press Club, and I'm pleased to report that the video of the talk is now also available on the ZeMKI YouTube channel. The channel also has many other great talks from this series, and is well worth checking out. Here's the video of my ComAI Lecture:
Axel Bruns. “Revisiting ‘the’ Public Sphere and Its Algorithmically Shaped Publics.” ComAI Lecture, Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung, Bremen, 7 Apr. 2026; guest lecture, University of Münster, 21 Apr. 2026.
In addition to the talk itself, I also participated in a brief interview with the ZeMKI team – this is now online too, in German and English versions.
Some weeks later, I also had the pleasure to join Bernhard Rieder and Annette Markham for a roundtable on Internet research methods as part of the Association of Internet Researchers' new AoIR Legacy Talk Series. We had a great discussion about the state of the field (and the impact of AI featured prominently here too, of course), and a recording of the roundtable is now also available to AoIR members – you'll need to use your member account to access it.
In mid-April, I visited the annual retreat of Southern Denmark University's Digital Democracy Centre, where I presented a keynote on our practice mapping approach to analysing social media data. The slides from that event are here:
Axel Bruns. “Exploring Destructive Polarisation: A Practice Mapping Approach to Social Media Debate about the Voice Referendum in Australia.” Invited presentation at GESIS – Leibniz-Institut für Sozialwissenschaften, Cologne, 30 Mar. 2026; invited keynote at the Digital Democracy Centre, Southern Denmark University, Nyborg, 15 Apr. 2026.
And finally, good news at last also on an article which has been on something of a slow boil for some time: I made a small contribution to a great piece of analysis of public discussions (on Twitter) of the controversial 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar, led by Sandrine Chausson at the University of Edinburgh. This has now been published in the Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, and just in time for the start of the 2026 World Cup in Canada, the USA, and Mexico, which is likely to be no less controversial:
Sandrine Chausson, Youssef Al Hariri, Axel Bruns, Walid Magdy, Björn Ross. “Beyond the Game: Comparing Political News Coverage and Twitter Discussions during the 2022 FIFA World Cup.” Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media, 6. DOI: 10.51685/jqd.2026.009.
And that's it for the moment – more in a few weeks from ICA 2026 in Cape Town...
