The first presenters on this second day at AoIR 2015 are Bernhard Rieder and Carolin Gerlitz, whose interest is in using data from Twitter's 'spritzer' firehose! which delivers a random 1% or all current tweets. How can this be used to identify individual types of activity in relation of the wider platform ecology? In particular, for the purposes of this paper, what light does it shed on the use of different devices for tweeting?

The project collected some 32 million tweets from the spritzer firehose over the course of one week, and key tools for tweeting were especially iPhone …

The final keynote at ASMC14 for today is by Bernhard Rieder from the Digital Methods Initiative, who stepped in at short notice for Tarleton Gillespie who could not be here. He begins by noting the role of algorithms in our experience of information and media; they select what information is considered most relevant to us, and are now a crucial part of our participation in public life. This raises a number of questions – and starting with search engines, such algorithms have been considered increasingly by researchers.

One way to approach algorithms is by considering the question of knowing: what …

It’s been a little quiet again here, as I’ve taken February and March off on Long Service Leave. That’s all about to change, though, because two major new research projects are about to start now – more of these soon.

For the moment, here’s my first conference presentation for 2014, from the Media Talk symposium at Griffith University in Brisbane. I used this to work through the three layers of communication on Twitter which Hallvard Moe and I have identified in our chapter in Twitter and Society, and to provide some examples for how these layers operate in practice …

Now that I’m back in Australia from my extended conference trip, I immediately got back on a plane to travel to a freezing Melbourne, to present our social media research in crisis communication and beyond at the 2013 IBM Research Colloquium. Below are my slides and audio – many thanks again to Jennifer Lai and her team at IBM Research Australia for the invitation!

The next panel at the Digital Methods conference begins with a panel by Theresa Sauter and me, on the viral distribution of links to the video of Julia Gillard's "misogyny" speech in 2012 as it was posted in full on the ABC News site. Unfortunately the audio recording didn't work out, so below are the slides only - do make sure you click on the links to see the video and the animations of the emerging retweet network.

The final speakers in this Digital Methods plenary are Axel Maireder and Katrin Jungnickel, whose interest is in the uncertainties of the Facebook timeline. Facebook has continued to tinker with how the timeline is selected and presented for several years now, and this affects the flow of communication on the platform; what, then, are the factors which determine that flow?

This study combined content analysis and user surveys, but both these approaches have their drawbacks - it is impossible from the outside to track the content of users' timelines, for example, but surveys of users also suffer from self-reporting biases …