Social Media

The final speaker in this AoIR 2015 session is Stuart Geiger, whose interest is in the collective block lists on Twitter that are developed by anti-harassment communities. This bypasses or sits alongside Twitter's own, 'official' anti-harassment (and anti-spam, etc.) efforts.

Stuart's own work began with Wikipedia, which has has a set of complex internal governance mechanisms and is increasingly using automated bots to militate against vandalism and other disruptions. Such bots are a form of bespoke code that is separate from but interacts with the sovereign, governmental code that underlies the Wikipedia platform itself.

Much of this became …

The next speaker at AoIR 2015 is Sikana Tanupabrungsun, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by gubernatorial candidates in 36 state elections across the United States in 2014. The focus here is on @mentioning between candidates, and the analysis was conducted using automated content analysis approaches. This found that the most frequent mode of address was to attack other candidates.

Online campaigns have been studied for several years, and a general finding is that incumbents employ more position-taking strategies, while challengers operate more often in attack mode. This may play out on Twitter slightly differently because of the …

The first presenter at AoIR 2015 this morning is Fabio Giglietto, whose interest is in the Twitter response to the Charlie Hebdo attack. Very quickly, the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie emerged to express sympathy and support for the magazine; a negative #JeNeSuisPasCharlie also emerged, however, to critique the magazine's actions. Fabio's interest here is in how this hashtag was discursively positioned.

There were some 74,000 tweets by 41,000 unique users with the negative hashtag, between 7 and 11 January 2015, and Fabio's team used quantitative and qualitative approaches to analyse them. They followed the method developed by Stefan Stieglitz and me to …

Up next at AoIR 2015 is the fabulous Luca Rossi, whose interest is in how scientific media events are now mediated via Twitter. His focus here is on the Rosetta mission and the Philae probe's landing on comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko. The mission was launched before Twitter was, but the approach and landing of the probe was covered closely by dedicated Twitter accounts and in widely promoted hashtags like #WakeUpRosetta.

This created a great deal of awareness and anticipation, and Luca's project gathered some 400,000 tweets related to the relevant hashtags. Using the approach for classifying hashtags that Stefan Stieglitz and …

The next speakers at AoIR 2015 are Kristen Guth and Alex Leavitt, who begin by highlighting Twitter's 2015 attempts to reduce the plagiarism of jokes by retweeting. Their real focus is on humour during the 2012 presidential debates in the US, though, and they focus on the three presidential debates during the campaign.

The team used live coding and dynamic keyword management during the debate, to capture as much as possible of the Twitter discussion around the debates. This resulted in 427 linguistic rules capturing some 33m tweets from 5.4m users, of which some 51% were retweets.

Audiences and journalists …

It's that time of the year when everything else stops and the international community of Internet researchers assembles for the annual AoIR conference. This time we're in Phoenix – arguably the warmest location AoIR has held its conference to date, and a trend very much worth continuing. I have a particularly good reason for coming to the conference this year – in addition to the usual programme of keynotes and presentations, my colleagues have seen fit to elect me as Vice-President of the Association of Internet Researchers, and I'm humbled by the honour of being able to help …

We are now inviting applications for the 2016 CCI Digital Methods Summer School. The deadline for application is Monday 21 Sep. 2016.

Hosted by the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), the 2016 event will focus on digital methods for sociocultural research. It is designed for university researchers at all stages of their careers, from doctoral students, postdoctoral and mid-career academics to established scholars.

The week-long intensive program will focus on new quantitative, qualitative and data-driven digital methods and their research applications in the humanities and social sciences, with a particular focus on media, communication and cultural …