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QUT Digital Media Research Centre

Snurb — Saturday 31 May 2025 12:33

Introducing Practice Mapping, at Home and Abroad

Politics | Polarisation | Travel | Journalism | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Social Media Network Mapping | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | ACSPRI 2024 | Bots Building Bridges 2025 | Weizenbaum-Institut 2025 |

I'm about to head off on a brief trip to Germany for a series of conferences and presentations, so this seems like a good moment for another update on recent developments. First off, I'm delighted to finally have a first publication out in the great Social Media + Society journal that introduces our new methodological approach of practice mapping. I've teased this in a few past posts and presentations already, not least in my keynote at the ACSPRI conference in November 2024, but together with my great QUT colleagues Kateryna Kasianenko, Vish Padinjaredath Suresh, Ehsan Dehghan, and Laura Vodden …

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Snurb — Monday 23 December 2024 16:01

A Final Round-Up of Publications and Other Updates from 2024

Politics | Elections | Government | Polarisation | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Internet Technologies | 'Big Data' | Artificial Intelligence | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Practice Mapping | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | AANZCA 2024 | ACSPRI 2024 | AoIR 2024 | ECREA 2024 | ICA 2023 |

I disappeared on summer holidays pretty much immediately after my keynote on practice mapping at the ACSPRI conference in Sydney in late November, so I haven’t yet had a chance to round up my and our last few publications for the year (as well as a handful of early arrivals from 2025). And what a year it’s been – although it’s felt as if I’ve taken a more supportive than leading role these past few months, there have still been quite a few new developments, and a good lot more to come. I’ll group these thematically here:

 

Polarisation, Destructive

…

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Snurb — Sunday 15 September 2024 18:18

Reflections on Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and Canada's C-18 Bill (CCIA 2024)

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | QUT Digital Media Research Centre |
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Snurb — Sunday 15 September 2024 17:57

And Speaking of Social Media...

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Internet Technologies | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | Streaming Media | QUT Digital Media Research Centre |

I’ve mentioned some of these already in my previous update, but wanted to collect them together again in a single post too: over the past few weeks I’ve had a burst of podcast engagements on a range of topics relating to social media. Some of these are also in connection with the new podcast series Read Them Sideways that my colleagues Sam Vilkins, Sebastian Svegaard, and Kate FitzGerald in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre have now kicked off – and you may want to subscribe to the whole series via Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or their RSS feed …

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Snurb — Thursday 12 September 2024 14:51

Reflections on Australia's News Media Bargaining Code and Canada's C-18 Bill

Politics | Government | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | Social Media | Facebook | QUT Digital Media Research Centre |

There’s rather a lot going on in Australian policy-making around social media, most of it thoroughly disconnected from evidence, scholarship, and sanity – and I’m sure I’ll have more to say on some of these developments in future posts, too. For the moment, though, here is an update on some ongoing work surrounding the renewed controversies about Australia’s ill-fated News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC), a thoroughly misshapen piece of legislation which sought to force major digital media platforms to hand over some of their revenue to cross-subsidise struggling commercial news media operators.

The inherent flaws in this approach led to …

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Snurb — Friday 3 November 2023 09:24

New QUT Promo Video Is Out

‘Fake News’ | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Research Projects | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) |

I’ve had the pleasure of being featured in the latest round of QUT research promo videos, discussing our QUT Digital Media Research Centre research into polarisation, partisanship, mis- and disinformation, and other topics, and including the work emerging from my current Australian Laureate Fellowship project. Also featured are my excellent DMRC colleagues Ehsan Dehghan and Kate O’Connor-Farfan, and if you look closely there’s also a plug for my recent book Are Filter Bubbles Real?

I think this came out quite nicely:

And along with other research leaders around the university, I also appeared in our latest university-wide promotional video. Don’t …

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Snurb — Thursday 22 December 2022 07:35

A Few More Updates before the End of the Year

Politics | Government | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | Echo Chambers and Filter Bubbles | Facebook | Social Media Network Mapping | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Amplifying Public Value: Scholarly Contributions’ Impact on Public Debate (ARC Linkage) | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | Global Journalism Innovation Lab (SSHRC) | Journalism beyond the Crisis (ARC Discovery) | Publications |

As the year and my Guest Professorship here at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich are coming to an end, here are a handful of final updates hot of the presses.

First, I’m very happy to say that at article about the Russian propaganda organ RT’s audiences on Facebook has just been published in Information, Communication & Society. This was a difficult piece of research not least because it involved coding data in six languages, but I’m delighted to say that we managed to find native speakers of all those languages (Russian …

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Snurb — Tuesday 18 October 2022 06:08

Independents' Day? Political Campaigning on Social Media in the 2022 Australian Federal Election (ECREA 2022)

Politics | Elections | Government | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | ECREA 2022 |
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Snurb — Saturday 8 October 2022 05:29

A Busy End to the Year

Politics | Elections | Travel | Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism | Journalism | Industrial Journalism | ‘Fake News’ | Social Media | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Dynamics of Partisanship and Polarisation in Online Public Debate (ARC Laureate Fellowship) | Evaluating the Challenge of ‘Fake News’ and Other Malinformation (ARC Discovery) | Conferences | AoIR 2022 | ECREA 2022 | NMRC 2022 | General Teaching Work |

As you are reading this, I’m probably in Zürich. Or in Stavanger. Aarhus. Hamburg. Dublin. Passau. Berlin. Vienna. The last few months of 2022 are going to be very busy.

But first things first: since the start of September, I’ve been in Zürich, on a semester-long guest professorship at the Institut für Kommunikationswissenschaft und Medienforschung (IKMZ) at the University of Zürich. We’d originally started planning this in 2019, but COVID-19 and the associated border closures put paid to that idea, and my hosts here have been able to keep the idea alive until now – so here I finally am …

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Snurb — Thursday 12 May 2022 02:02

Following the 2022 Australian Federal Election … from Italy

Politics | Elections | Government | Travel | Social Media | Facebook | Twitter | QUT Digital Media Research Centre | Conferences |

I’m on my first conference trip since COVID hit, and currently at Konrad Adenauer’s old summer residence Villa La Collina in Cadenabbia, Italy, where we’ve just concluded the Digital Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres symposium ahead of the massive International Communication Association conference in Paris later this month. Many thanks to Ulrike Klinger and Uta Rußmann for organising the event, and the Adenauer Foundation for hosting us.

On behalf of my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues Dan Angus, Tim Graham, Ehsan Dehghan and myself I presented a first take on social media the 2022 Australian federal election at this …

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Recent Work

Presentations and Talks

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

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Books, Papers, Articles

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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