Without in-person conferences to liveblog, this site has been a little quiet recently. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t any news to report – so here is the first of a number of posts with updates on recent activities. First of all, I’m very pleased that a number of articles I’ve contributed to have finally been published over the past few months – and in particular, that they represent the results of a range of collaborations with new and old colleagues.

The first of these is a new book chapter led by my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleague and former PhD student Ehsan Dehghan, which provides a useful update on his and our current approach to discourse analysis. Building on Ehsan’s work for his excellent PhD thesis, the book chapter connects a detailed methodological overview with the conceptual approaches of Laclau and Mouffe, exploring the presence of agonistic and antagonistic tendencies across a number of case studies. The chapter was published in the third volume in Rebecca Lind’s Produsing Theory book series, which in its title also draws on my concept of produsage, of course.

Dehghan, Ehsan, Axel Bruns, Peta Mitchell, and Brenda Moon. “Discourse-Analytical Studies on Social Media Platforms: A Data-Driven Mixed-Methods Approach.” Produsing Theory in a Digital World 3.0, ed. Rebecca Ann Lind. New York: Peter Lang, 2020. 159–77. DOI:10.3726/b13192/20.

A second new article results from another collaboration with a former PhD student, Felix Münch, now a postdoctoral researcher at the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg. Building on the work Felix presented at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium in Urbino, this article in Social Media + Society outlines a new approach to mapping the network structure of a national Twittersphere, offering a pathway towards generating some critically important baseline data against which observations from hashtag- and keyword-based studies may be compared.

Münch, Felix Victor, Ben Thies, Cornelius Puschmann, and Axel Bruns. “Walking through Twitter: Sampling a Language-Based Follow Network of Influential Twitter Accounts.” Social Media + Society 7.1, (2021) DOI:10.1177/2056305120984475.

Third, I’m also very pleased to have made a contribution to a new article in Digital Journalism by Magdalena Wischnewski, a visiting PhD scholar supported by the RISE-SMA research network coordinated by Stefan Stieglitz at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Caught up in the travel disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, Magdalena spent rather more time with us at the QUT DMRC than we had planned, but happily we were able to put this extra time to good use and investigate the motivations for sharing hyper-partisan content (in this case study, from InfoWars) on Twitter.

Like most of us, the current COVID-19 crisis has forced me to work from home for the foreseeable future, but my colleagues and I at the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have remained just as busy – in fact, of course, as a significant driver of journalistic coverage, of newssharing through social media (including both legitimate news and various forms of mis- and disinformation), and of general social media debate and discussion, the crisis intersects directly with some of our core research areas.

Many of us in this field now have urgent research projects in train that address some of these phenomena, and there are also many important conversations about how we can engage in rapid research and publication projects without sacrificing the necessary scholarly rigour. At the same time a number of key public outreach activities have also been organised to ensure that we have the platforms to share our findings with the general public.

My own focus in this has been to investigate the patterns of what the World Health Organisation has described as an ‘infodemic’: the viral transmission of mis- and disinformation associated with the coronavirus pandemic that has the potential to do real harm to the general population. This also aligns with a new research project on Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (funded by the Australian Research Council and also involving Stephen Harrington, Dan Angus, Scott Wright, Jenny Stromer-Galley, and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen) which is about to commence.

Together with my colleague Tim Graham I have presented some early observations from this work, focussing especially on the dynamics of some common COVID-19 conspiracy theories, in the Australia Institute’s ‘Australia at Home’ online seminar series. The video from our presentation is below, and I have also posted the full slides and background to the seminar.

Further, I was also very pleased to participate in a public discussion organised by Jack Qiu for the Chinese Communication Association, as part of their Solidarity Symposium series. Together with some of the leading Chinese digital and social media communication researchers, we had an intensive and wide-ranging discussion about the opportunities and challenges of doing this research, from home or elsewhere, and shared some of our own emerging insights into communication patterns during the current crisis. The seminar video is below, and I’ve posted more details elsewhere.

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Chen-Ling Hung, who presents a case study on typhoon Jebi’s impact on Japan in September 2018, which forced the closure of Kansai airport and led to substantial disruptions especially for the city of Osaka. Many travellers, including especially Chinese tourists, were affected, and there was a subsequent political storm in Taiwan, especially also in online media, when it emerged that Taiwanese citizens may also have received assistance from Chinese consular authorities if they identified themselves as Chinese (rather than Taiwanese).

The final paper in this final session of Social Media & Society 2018 is Sonya Sachdeva, whose interest is in the role of social media in discussing the smoke from wildfires. Wildfires themselves have become more prevalent and more intense around the world, as a result of climate change, and the smoke from such fires can affect far larger areas than the fires themselves. Some two thirds of the United States are affected by the smoke from wildfires, even if they are nowhere near forests and firezones.

The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Wasim Ahmed, whose focus is on discussions of infectious diseases on Twitter. Such diseases can be very deadly, and when outbreaks occur they lead to the public expression of people’s views and opinions via social media. There’s a need to further understand such communication processes, beyond mere metrics, through qualitative and mixed-methods approaches.

The final session at Social Media & Society 2018 starts with Supraja Gurajala, whose interest is in using Twitter data for responding to air quality issues. Air quality is a major health issue in population and industrial centres around the world, and metrics like the Air Quality Index (AQI) and Particulate Matter index (PM) are key to its assessment.

We’re already deep into February 2017, but I thought I’d finally put together an overview of what I’ve been up to during the past year, at least as far as research outputs are concerned. It’s been a busy year by any measure, with a number of key projects coming to completion; research publications from some of these are still in production, but here’s what’s already come out.