A couple more new publications before I head off overseas again (mainly for research workshops, but I’ll also take in the Digital Humanities conference in Hamburg and the Conference on Science and the Internet in Düsseldorf):
This article in a special issue of Media International Australia on the history of the Internet in Australia, edited by Gerard Goggin and Jock Given, reviews the development of the Australian political blogosphere, from the earlier ‘blog wars’ especially around the 2007 election to the increasing incorporation of leading blogs and bloggers into mainstream media stables.
A very brief introduction to our current thinking on the role of Twitter in relation to television. We outline a number of dimensions to this relationship, and point to key areas for further research and development.
Phew – it’s been a busy month since my last update. Here’s a run-down of the latest news. First, the emerging maps of the Australian Twittersphere which I presented at the Digital Humanities Australasia conference in Canberra in March have received quite a bit of press coverage over the past week or so, following our press release about this work. Here are some of the highlights:
The Australian ran a big page three article about our research, and reprinted the annotated map itself;
I’ve also done about a dozen radio interviews about this research (which isn’t easy, considering how visual this work is); will post up some links to recordings if they become available. More information about this work is also available on the (newly refurbished) Mapping Online Publics Website, of course.
Briefly back in Australia, yesterday I went down to Sydney to speak at the Australian Society of Archivists’ 2011 Symposium (staged at the fabulous Luna Park venue). My paper was meant as an urgent call to action on the question of archiving public activities in social media spaces – so much material which will be of immense value to future researchers is being lost every day if we don’t get our act together very soon; we can’t wait for the lumbering beast that is the U.S. Library of Congress to do the job for us, however fulsomely they’ve promised to archive the full public Twitter firehose. The truth is, here in Australia we already have the technologies for capturing and archiving large datasets of public communication on Twitter and elsewhere – but someone with the necessary public standing and archivist expertise (the National Library, the National Archives, …) must now take the initiative; the sooner, the better.