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'Big Data'

Snurb — Saturday 24 October 2015 08:43

Understanding How Ordinary Users Comprehend Data Visualisations

'Big Data' | AoIR 2015 |

The final speaker in this session at AoIR 2015 is Helen Kennedy, whose interest is in how people interact with data visualisations. This is very important in the context of the current datafication trend. But existing literature in this field lacks a user-centred knowledge base – much is driven by designers' instincts of what constitutes a good data visualisation. It mobilises narrow definitions and measures of effectiveness and provides little information about participants, while ignoring social and cultural factors.

This work, then, could learn from media and cultural studies work that investigates how audiences engage with media texts. Helen's work …

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Snurb — Saturday 24 October 2015 04:26

The Problems with Gathering Data from Weibo

'Big Data' | Social Media | Twitter | AoIR 2015 |

The second speaker on this AoIR 2015 session is QUT DMRC PhD researcher Jing Zeng, whose focus is on the challenges associated with accessing data from popular Chinese social media platform Weibo. Weibo, meaning 'micro-blog' in Chinese, is a Chinese take on social media services such as Twitter. Sina Weibo is now the most successful of such services in China, with several hundred million users now present on the site.

There is a substantial volume of research now addressing Weibo, but inside of China much of this work still comes only from computer science fields, while …

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Snurb — Friday 23 October 2015 09:37

Understanding How Researchers Are Envisaging Big Data

'Big Data' | AoIR 2015 |

The final presenter at AoIR 2015 today is Anissa Tanweer, whose interest is in the shift towards big data. This has been a major buzzword, and has enabled the rise of data science; her team has conducted an ethnography of the data science environment.

One of the major challenges in working with big data is how researchers envision their data; it is no longer possible to visually review the entire dataset, for example, and the picture of the dataset is constantly evolving. This is especially crucial in moments of breakdown that require a repair of the dataset, and may lead …

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Snurb — Friday 23 October 2015 09:35

Scientists' Attitudes towards Data Sharing

'Big Data' | AoIR 2015 |

The next session at AoIR 2015 is starting with Catherine Brooks, whose interest is in scientific collaboration: how do scientists organise themselves and manage their data? This is an increasingly crucial question in (big) data-enabled science. One problem is that of dark data – unused, overlooked, rejected data from past research projects, which could be placed on cloud-based storage platforms to make them useful again.

These questions could be understood from actor-network theory or human and technology studies perspectives – the ultimate goal could be the democratisation of data, to increase their further usefulness. Data often follow the paths of …

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Snurb — Thursday 27 August 2015 09:08

Call for Applications: CCI Digital Methods Summer School, 15-19 Feb. 2016 (#cciss16)

Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Social Media | CCi | Conferences |

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 …

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Snurb — Monday 17 August 2015 17:35

Some New Publications

Politics | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | TrISMA (ARC LIEF) | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship | Publications |

It’s been some time since I last posted an update on my latest publications – though you may have seen that on the front page of this site, I’ve updated the banner of the most recent books I’ve been featured in, at last. There is quite a lot more work in the pipeline for the immediate future, including a major new collection which I’ve edited with colleagues in Norway and Sweden – more on that soon.

For now, though, you wouldn’t go wrong if you started by checking out the new journal Social Media + Society, which I’m …

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Snurb — Monday 13 April 2015 09:57

Postdoc Position Available: Public Sphere Theory and Social Media Analytics

Politics | Journalism | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship |

In addition to the PhD position I advertised last week, I am now also offering a two-year, full-time postdoc position on the same project at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia (international applicants are very welcome). If you’re interested and qualified for the position, please submit a detailed application through the QUT jobs Website, responding to the selection criteria. Full details for the job can be found there, and below I’m including the key details from the job description:

Position Purpose

This appointment supports an ARC Future Fellowship research project investigating intermedia information flows in the …

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Snurb — Thursday 9 April 2015 11:42

Call for PhD Applications: Social Media and Public Communication

Politics | Journalism | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | ARC Future Fellowship |

We’re now looking for the second PhD student associated with my current ARC Future Fellowship project. The PhD student will receive an annual stipend of A$25,849 over the three years of the PhD project. If you’re interested in and qualified for the PhD project, please contact me by 1 May 2015, directly at a.bruns@qut.edu.au with your CV, names of two referees, and a detailed statement addressing the Eligibility Requirements below. We’ll select the candidate on this basis, and will then ask you to formally apply for the PhD place through the QUT Website.

Full details are below – please …

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Snurb — Saturday 15 November 2014 21:34

Crowdsourced Images in the Boston Marathon Attack

Journalism | 'Big Data' | Social Media | Crisis Communication | Twitter | ECREA 2014 |

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Anssi Männistö, who shifts our focus to the Boston Marathon bomb attack. Mobile social media played an important role in covering this attact: tweets and mobile media were no longer just sources of information, but also tools to very facts and photos and to identify potential suspects, through image recognition software and other facilities.

In Boston, journalists rapidly discovered the first reports and images of the attack from Twitter, and soon came to use them in their own coverage. Such material was then used in official investigations, unofficial hunts for the culprits …

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Snurb — Saturday 15 November 2014 21:33

Visualisations for Doing Good with Data

'Big Data' | ECREA 2014 |

Ok, so I've boycotted the stupidly early 8.30 a.m. paper session at ECREA 2014. My day starts, consequently, with a paper by Helen Kennedy and Rosemary Hill, whose focus is on data visualisation. Data-driven decision-making remains out of reach for those who cannot work with the data directly, and data visualisation may help here.

There are now visualisation agencies such as Periscopic which specialise in data visualisation for social good. The idea here is to mobilise data graphically, to make data useful to a greater audience. Such visualisations include the work of The Guardian's Data Blog, for example …

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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

Beyond Interaction Networks: An Introduction to Practice Mapping (ACSPRI 2024)

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Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks (Social Media + Society)

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Inside the Moral Panic at Australia's 'First of Its Kind' Summit about Kids on Social Media (Crikey)

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Brightest before Dawn (CD, 2011)

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Gatewatching and News Curation: The Lecture Series

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