The next session at ECREA 2012 begins at a more reasonable time, and is on news representations of foreign affairs. Melanie Magin begins by presenting on the mass media representation of the Arab Spring as a 'social media revolution'. This is an overstatement, of course, driven by the mass media's focus on social media in their coverage.

The final speaker in this ECREA 2012 session is Rob Procter, who shifts our attention to the London and UK riots in August 2011. His project collected some 2.6 million tweets from some 700,000 accounts using relevant hashtags from the Twitter firehose, and combines quantitative and qualitative analysis.

The next speakers in our ECREA 2012 panel are Laura Ahva and Maria Hellman, whose interest is in the citizen eyewitnessing of crises. Witnessing has always been a central task of crisis journalism, but citizen-generated content is now increasingly important; citizen eyewitness images are especially central now, and are mediated from the sites of crises to the global audience. The Arab Spring provides a very useful recent example for this.

The next ECREA 2012 paper is presented by Nina Krüger, and focusses on brand communication activities during corporate crises. Enterprises are increasingly using social media for communication with their customers, of course, but to some extent still regard social media as black boxes; much more development – and research – needs to be done here.

The next presentation in this ECREA 2012 session is my co-authored paper with Jean Burgess on our research into the uses of Twitter in the 2011 Queensland floods and Christchurch earthquake. The slides are below, and audio will follow soon. I'm afraid the audio recording didn't work out. Feel free to listen to some of my other presentations on social media and crisis communication instead...

Analysing Twitter Activity in Crisis Contexts from Axel Bruns

The next ECREA 2012 session is on social media and crisis communication, and I have my final paper for this trip in this session as well. We start with Farida Vis, though, whose focus is on the use of Twitter by the London Metropolitan Police. This relates also to the emergence of data journalism, to the work to understand the positioning of Twitter in the wider mediasphere, and to the overall interest in the 'big data' question which has grown over the last year or so.

Up next at AoIR 2012 is Zizi Papacharissi, whose focus is on structures of affect and their connection to political engagement. What is the texture of feeling here – for example in the expression of sentiment on Twitter? In her talk here, Zizi will focus on the #egypt hashtag.

Well, as Tuesday's blogburst already indicated, I'm slowly progressing on my current travels. The event at the Copenhagen Centre for Communication and Computing was something of a preview for a panel on "Digital Data – Lost, Found, and Made" which is on the programme for the 2012 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers here in Salford; expect plenty of liveblogging from that conference to start tomorrow.

Before this conference and the Copenhagen event, though, I spent a few days in Helsinki, where I gave two guest lectures in the international Masters course – and I've neglected to post those lectures here so far. So, here they are. Unfortunately, my audio recorder ran out of batteries during the first lecture, so there are only slides for it - however, that lecture was a repeat of my SBPJor keynote in Brazil last October, so you can go to those slides for the audio.

Below are the two lectures: