Gatewatching and Citizen Journalism

(Crossposted from Gatewatching.)

In this second part, we'll follow on from our discussion of key themes in The Other Cheek, Larvatus Prodeo, and Club Troppo by looking at the concept maps which Leximancer produces. But first, a recap of the background for this study: I've already posted about our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) and the end of January 2008. We distinguish between different functional components of blogs and blog pages, and what I'm focussing on here are the blog posts themselves, which are of course the major discursive element of any blog - as part of our approach, we've separated these posts from all other content on the blog (headers, footers, blogrolls, sidebars, comments sections, etc.).

What I've done here in the first place is to run the concept mapping software Leximancer over the content gathered from a selection of key Australian blogs. In the first part of this post, I simply listed the key terms for each blog in order of frequency (giving a quick indication of what they're frequently talking about), which produced some notable differences between the three blogs. My reading of this is that Club Troppo focusses much more strongly on policy analysis over political wonkery and insider gossip; for The Other Cheek, the balance is reversed, while Larvatus Prodeo sits somewhere in the middle.

In this second part, I'll map these blogs' key terms in relation to one another - terms which frequently co-occur in close proximity to one another in the text are located closer to one another on the map than terms which don't, in other words. The resulting maps provide further support to the observation that the blogs have different points of focus in their day-to-day coverage of politics - and by plotting all frequently-used terms on the map, the exact nature of these topical clusters becomes a little clearer, too.

(Cross-posted from Gatewatching.)

In a previous post, I mentioned our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) and the end of January 2008, and we've now begun an exploratory analysis of this corpus of data.

As noted in our discussion paper for this project, the first step in this analysis is to distinguish between different functional components of blogs and blog pages (something that does not necessarily happen in comparable studies, by the way). So, what I'm focussing on here are the blog posts themselves, which are of course the major discursive element of any blog - as part of our approach, we've separated these posts from all other content on the blog (headers, footers, blogrolls, sidebars, comments sections, etc.). While I'll mainly discuss content analysis here, this is especially important also in the context of link analysis, of course, where blogroll, comment, and other links skew the data if we want to focus on examining the discursive network between blog posts.

So, building on this corpus of blog post data, here are some preliminary observations. What I've done here in the first place is to run the concept mapping software Leximancer over the content gathered from a selection of key Australian blogs, to both fine-tune that process and see if any discernible differences between individual blogs emerge. I'll present the results in two ways: one simply lists the key terms for each blog in order of frequency (giving a quick indication of what they're frequently talking about), and the second maps these key terms in relation to one another - terms which frequently co-occur in close proximity to one another in the text are located closer to one another than terms which don't, in other words. (I'll post these maps later, in the second part of this post.)

The last months have been enormously productive (and, at times, exhausting!) for me. In addition to my own book Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage, I've also contributed to a number of other publications - and quite a few of them are now finally available in print and/or online.

In a previous post, I've already mentioned Megan Boler's edited collection Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times. I've now received my copy of the book, and very nice it looks, too - a great collection of essays from many key authors and researchers in the field, combined with Megan's interviews with journalists and media activists including Robert McChesney and Hassan Ibrahim of Al Jazeera. My own contribution explores the post-tactical opportunities for citizen media, and draws parallels to the long-term establisment of other once tactical movements; a pre-print version of the chapter is online here. The book is available from Amazon and MIT Press.

It's been a long time between drinks, but over at ABC Online they've just posted the latest Club Bloggery article by Jason, Barry, and me - and we've also reposted it at Gatewatching, as usual. This time, we're reflecting on recent revelations that Liberal Party staffers in Victoria ran a blog to discredit their own leader - from party premises...

Baillieu and the Blogs of War

By Jason Wilson, Axel Bruns and Barry Saunders

I'm crossposting this from Gatewatching.org, where a discussion about the influence of Australian political bloggers on wider political processes that was kicked off by Jason Wilson's recent posts on Tim Blair's move to the Daily Telegraph and Christian Kerr's summary dismissal of Ozblogistan's political combattants in The Australian has prompted me to finally post up some more information about the research we're currently engaged in at QUT, in collaboration with our excellent colleagues at the University St. Gallen in Switzerland. I'm also attaching a detailed discussion paper which documents our methodological model in some more detail - we'd love to get further feedback on this, from fellow researchers and interested bloggers alike. (For a more condensed version of this material, please see our paper for the ISEA 2008 conference in Singapore.)

The Vibewire discussion on e-participation and e-democracy as part of its e-Festival of Ideas continues - and there have been a number of really interesting posts in yesterday's thread already. We're now diversifying into a number of threads, and I've posted a new contribution (picking up on some themes from yesterday) now. Comments welcome - here or on the Vibewire fora.

OK, I'll make a start here. It was very interesting to follow the discussion yesterday, and in that thread, Martin Stewart-Weeks asked a really useful critical question:

Strikes me that eDemocracy, if it's going to be anything interesting, has to play in the middle of this new (renewed?) contest between the individual and the institution. This, to me, gets close to the heart of the matter. If institutions are now, for the most part, the wrong way to harness collective intelligence for a purpose, then what will do that job in the future?

How exactly do swarms of smart, geeky "youths", for all their invention and creativity, constitute a force for sustained action and purpose - as opposed to having a wonderful time ripping down Scientology for a while?

Brisbane.
The post-lunch session at AMIC 2008 starts with Zheng Jiawen from Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, whose focus is on citizen journalism in China - and particular, on Zola Zhou, popularly recognised as China's first citizen journalist. Broadly, citizen journalism is a public response to the inadequate performance of the mainstream journalism industry (and rose to prominence especially after the events of 11 September 2001). Its rise also contributed to a new debate on the nature of journalism itself, and many initial views argued that news blogging was not journalism due to the narrow subjects explored by most blogs, the reliance on second-hand information, the limited sources and experience of news blogging, and its limited credibility.

Brisbane.
I was the first presenter in the next session at AMIC 2008 (and my presentation on citizen journalism in the 2007 Australian federal election is already online here). Hopefully the audio recording worked as well - I'll add it as soon as possible. The audio from my talk is now online.

Brisbane.
The second day of the AMIC conference has now started, and we begin with a keynote from Vipul Kant Upadhay, the CEO and Editor in Chief of Merinews.com in India. This site is now the largest Internet news portal in the country, and builds very significantly on citizen journalism. Vipul begins by noting that he is no journalist by profession, but instead came to this venture through student activism; his initial motivation was the widespread corruption and nepotism in India.

Over the next few weeks I'll be a participant in a number of events in Brisbane and online. As always, I'll try to do as much live-blogging as possible. Here's a preview of what's coming up:

• This Wednesday and Thursday I'm at the AMIC conference on Convergence, Citizen Journalism, and Social Change, where I'll also present my paper "Citizen Journalism in the 2007 Australian Federal Election (AMIC 2008)". I've already uploaded the Powerpoint slides and full paper for this (a round-up of citizen journalism developments during the 2007 Australian federal election), and I'll try to record the presentation as well.
  

• I'll end up missing the last half-day of the AMIC conference, though - I've also been invited to attend the "Creative Destruction: Lessons for Science and Innovation Policy from the Rise of the Creative Industries" workshop organised by the Centre for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi) and the Forum for European-Australian Science and Technology Cooperation (FEAST), which takes place on Thursday and Friday, and I'll make it to the Friday round-table discussions at least. The focus of this workshop is on further developing the new field of cultural science (an extension of cultural studies through a strong injection of evolutionary economics, in the context of creative industries research), and I'm currently working my way through the position papers circulated in advance of the workshop (and presented on day one) - heady stuff in an area which is closely linked with my own research into produsage. Given the complexity of the material, hopefully I'll be able to capture the key discussions at least.

• Finally, a couple of weeks later, on 8-12 April, I'll take part in the online "e-Festival of Ideas" organised by Vibewire, and discussing democracy, media, arts, and social change. More information below: