A couple of months ago, I presented a critique of the concept of  'the' public sphere at the 2026 Digital Media Research Centre Summer School in Brisbane. Like the other talks in that segment of the Summer School programme, the team producing our DMRC podcast Read Them Sideways has now also published a recording of that talk for your listening pleasure, so here it is:

I think the podcast works fine by itself; since some of the presentation was fairly visual, though, if you'd like to flick through the slides while you listen I've embedded them below as well. And …

After the excitement of the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library last week I have now arrived at the Zentrum für Medien-, Kommunikations- und Informationsforschung (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen, where I’ll spend the next couple of months as a Mercator Fellow. 

There will be a handful of side trips to other colleagues across Europe from here as well, though; in fact, I’ll begin the coming week with two days at GESIS, the Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, in Cologne, where I’ll also give a public lecture on our practice mapping approach as …

As I write this I'm just about to head off to Germany for a keynote at the Social Media Access Days at the German National Library, followed by a three-month stay as a Mercator Fellow at the fabulous Centre for Media, Communication, and Information Research (ZeMKI) at the University of Bremen, thanks to the Communicative AI Research Unit. That stay will also enable me to visit a number of other colleagues and collaborators along the way, including at GESIS in Köln, the University of Southern Denmark in Odense, the University of Münster, the Hans-Bredow-Institut in Hamburg, LMU München, and …

In addition to the conference presentations I covered in my last post, the last few months have also seen a number of new publications from my team and me – including no less than three new articles in the great Media International Australia journal.

Just days from the end of the year, my colleagues Simon Copland, Tim Graham, and I finally published our analysis of the domestic and international audiences of Australian right-wing news channel Sky News Australia (no relation to Sky News in the UK and elsewhere) on Facebook during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and the …

2025 is finally over, but other than as part of the liveblogs I haven't yet had a chance to round up our various presentations at conferences during the second half of the past year. We ended the year with the AANZCA conference on the Sunshine Coast, where I presented what was something of a labour of love: a look back on ten turbulent years of the #auspol hashtag on what used to be Twitter. 

Through the efforts of a series of excellent data scientists in our QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC) team (especially Brenda Moon, Felix Münch, Jane Tan …