Day two at ECREA 2012 starts with a panel on political communication using social media which I've had a hand in organising, and the panel begins with our paper on Twitter in the recent Queensland state elections. The slides are below – audio to follow... is also available now.

Political Networks on Twitter: Tweeting the Queensland State Election from Axel Bruns

My own paper starts the ICA-flavoured session at ECREA 2012 this afternoon; my presentation built on our research into the uses of Twitter to explore how we might reconceptualise the public sphere. The slides are below; audio will follow. now online, too.

Social Media, Big Data, and the Public Sphere from Axel Bruns

The next speaker in this AoIR 2012 panel is Niels Brügger, who steps back from online social networks to present some more general observations about network analysis. His specific interest is in Web historiography – how can network analysis be applied to archival Web material, then?

The next speaker on this AoIR 2012 panel is Frauke Zeller, who continues the focus on mixed-methods approaches to online social network analysis. This methodological paradigm is still quite new, and there is considerable uncertainty about best practices in research; network analysis alone cannot be enough.

The final session at AoIR 2012 this evening is a panel on online social network analysis. Jakob Linaa Jensen starts us off by reflecting on the methods for studying online social networks, and notes the importance of both tracking social media use in practice and asking users about their uses.

The next session at AoIR 2012 begins with a paper presented by Julian Ausserhofer and Axel Maireder about national politics on Twitter, in the case of Austria. Twitter is now being used by a range of political actors in the country, including journalists and politicians, who are at times publicly interacting with one another using the platform. Many users also link to news media materials, of course.