Social Media

My QUT DMRC colleague Jean Burgess and I are next at AoIR 2015, presenting the core points from our chapter "Easy Data, Hard Data" in the Compromised Data collection. (The slides are below.) The chapter thinks through the pragmatics and politics of being social media researchers in a complex and precarious environment, and thus builds on David Berry's work on the computational turn in humanities and social science research.

This turn towards large data is instrumental as well as transformational – it has exciting practical dimensions as new but unevenly distributed and challenging research opportunities arise, but …

The final panel at AoIR 2015 for today is the Compromised Data panel, celebrating the release of the book of the same name. Ganaele Langlois starts us off by highlighting the key themes of the book: data are now crucial to building the social, and the gaps and omissions in the data therefore have very significant impacts.

Governments such as the Harper government in Canada, which has just been removed from office, seek to hide some forms of data because it is politically expedient to do so, and so data are political; data are also shaped by the sources we …

The next AoIR 2015 speaker is Anna Sophia Kümpel, whose interest is in news usage patterns and their effects on political participatory behaviours. Mass media remain identified as a crucial determinant of political participatory behaviour, though their exact effects on participation remain disputed. One new factor which emerges in addition to this in more recent times is the question of which devices are being used.

Anna's project used a representative sample of German media users, and asked participants about how they learnt about news events, how they obtained further information, and what devices they used as they did so, as …

The final presenter in this AoIR 2015 session is Luca Rossi, who shifts our attention to Italian politics. His interest moves beyond elections, too, as elections represent a very specific political moment. Internet and social media use in Italy is still relatively limited – in 2012, only 62% of the population were online, and the main source of information remains television.

At the same time, some 36% of Italian social media users engage in political debate – an unusually high number. This may be due in part to the substantial connections between mainstream media and the political establishment in Italy …

Up next in this AoIR 2015 session is AoIR president Jenny Stromer-Galley, whose focus is on the social media use of US gubernatorial candidates. Their tweeting activities are linked of course to the very lengthy US electoral process from surfacing candidates through primaries and nominating conventions to the elections themselves.

Most of the research into social media use during these elections tends to aggregate general election messaging, but this is strongly affected by a variety of external factors, too. There are some fairly established rhythms of general elections: from early strategic messaging through mid-campaign debates and mobilisation to end-game reinforcement …

The next AoIR 2015 paper is by Tim Highfield and me, and I'll add I've added our presentation slides below as soon as I can. The paper will also be a chapter in the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics, which my colleagues Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Larsson, Christian Christensen and I have edited – and which will appear in early 2016.

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 …