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.
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?
Software-supported network analysis builds on hyperlinks on the Web – not on the wider context of Web content production. But hyperlinks always have a meaning; they are made for a reason, and constitute a performative entity which enables movement from one document to another. Web archives complicate such meaning as they cannot normally constitute …
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.
Frauke specifically highlights the multimodality of social network content, which complicates analysis, and notes issues with the availability and verifiability of content as well. Further, are social networks a tool for research, or an object of study?
Facebook research themes include the questions of who is using Facebook, what users do on Facebook …
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. Jakob also draws a distinction between social media and social networks, where social media are spaces where users can create profiles and share content, and social networks are a smaller subset which is focussed centrally on the user and their networking activities, less on content.
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.
Twitter communication is public by default; there is a low threshold to communication and Twitter is very open to participation. At the same time, the question is whether this leads to a …
My own paper started the post-lunch session at the CCC Symposium, discussing our Mapping Online Publics work in the field of Twitter research. I'll post up the slides and audio properly as soon as I can!
It’s that time of the year again, when I set off for the usual end-of-year round of conferences – and this year has turned out to be an especially busy one. As I write this, I’m already in Toronto for the inaugural workshop of a Canadian-funded, multi-partner research project on Social Media and Campaigning which is led by Greg Elmer of Ryerson University; this comes at an interesting time, of course, with electioneering south of the border in full swing. We’re already tracking the Twitter performance of both campaigns’ key accounts – more on that as it develops.
