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Social Media Network Mapping

Mapping Out the Next Few Months

Following on from my previous post, here’s an overview of what’s to come. And there’s quite a bit: on Saturday, I’m heading off to Europe again for a series of conferences and research workshops – many of them related to our social media research work at Mapping Online Publics.

First, my colleagues Jean Burgess, Tanya Nitins, and I will spend a week or so at the University of Münster to work with our ATN-DAAD project partner Stefan Stieglitz and his team; we’re collaborating on a project which examines the use of Twitter for brand management. The project will examine how brands perform on Twitter, and how they deal with negative perceptions and other emerging issues; it’s still in its formative stages, so expect to find out more as we get going properly!

From there, Jean and I head on to the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) conference in Reykjavik – a massive event, by all accounts; apparently there will be some 2500 delegates all up (hope there’s enough hotel rooms). We’re presenting a paper which examines the role of Twitter hashtags for the formation of ad hoc political issue publics: “The Use of Twitter Hashtags in the Formation of Ad Hoc Publics.” You’ll be able to follow my liveblogging from the conference here on the blog, of course.

A Few Belated Additions

Hello, blog – it’s been a while. I’m afraid I’ve been a bit slack in updating this site with recent events, so I’ve just made a number of rather belated additions. I’m about to head off to Europe again soon to present at a number of conferences, too (more on that in a separate post shortly), so expect the usual conference blogging again then; for now, though, let’s catch up on some recent news.

Part of my tardiness here is related to the Mapping Online Publics project, which is incredibly active at the moment. It now combines our major ARC Discovery project with a couple of ATN-DAAD-funded collaborations with researchers at the universities of Münster and Düsseldorf in Germany, as well as a CCI-internal project on Media Ecologies and Methodological Innovation. Much of our recent focus has been on social media in crisis communication, and I’ve now added a number of recent presentations to this blog:

Networks of Political Blogging in Greece

Krems.
The final speaker in this CeDEM 2011 session is Kostas Zafiropoulos, whose interest is in political blogging in Greece. He describes Greek blogs as a self-organising community, and begins by showing the well-known image from Adamic & Glance’s study of the US political blogosphere around the 2004 election (which, analysing the patterns of interlinking between blogs, showed a highly polarised environment at the time).

Kostas’s project undertook a similar study for Greece. They began by using Technorati to find Greek political blogs (with “some” authority, according to Technorati’s measures), and tagged them according to their political orientation. During May 2009, they identified some 101 blogs through this process.

Some Long-Overdue Updates

Sorry: it’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog. Largely, that’s because I’ve been so busy with our work on the Mapping Online Publics project – see the project blog for all the latest information. Following the various natural disasters we’ve endured – in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, to begin with –, that work has focussed for the moment especially on the use of social media for crisis communication, with plenty of outcomes already. In particular, this includes our two most recent presentations:

Slides and audio from both presentations are now online here – just follow the links above.

Some More Presentations to Finish the Year

As 2010 draws to a close, its perhaps appropriate that my last couple of conference presentations for the year take a somewhat retrospective nature, summarising and reflecting on the 2010 Australian federal election, with a particular view on what we’ve learned about the state of Australian journalism in general and the role of Twitter in election coverage and debate in particular. I’ll present both those papers at different conferences in Sydney this Friday (26 November):

Slides for both those presentations are below, and I’ll try and add audio later both with audio.

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