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) …

(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 …

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 …