Our paper was next at ECPR 2011 – and we presented our thoughts on the role of Twitter hashtags in providing a space for ad hoc online publics. This also builds on some of the work we’ve done during our week-long workshop at the University of Münster last week. I’ll add audio shortly Audio included below, PDF available here:

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Ben O’Loughlin, whose interest is in the effect of near real-time semantic analysis of public sentiments (online) on continuing political processes: in the end, we may end up with a kind of semantic polling of available social media and other electronic data, which enables political actors to target their messages to voters with unprecedented precision and speed. The 2010 election in the U.K. may have been the first rudimentary example of such a feedback loop.

Ben’s study examined the social media data used by TV and print journalists during the election, and interviewed key actors about their emerging practices in dealing with such data. Three main types of reporting were notable: anecdotal (pulling random tweets out of the timeline); quantitative (general stats on user activity as reported by various polling companies); and semantic (processing the content of social media sources).

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Andreas Jungherr, whose interest is in using Twitter data to detect events by identifying sudden bursts of activity in the continuing stream of updates. Such research is especially straightforward on Twitter, due to its convenient API access formats; additionally, the short format of Twitter messages means that key themes in messages can be more easily identified.

Twitter itself does some of this, of course, with its ‘trending topics’ (also broken down for specific geographical regions); further, it is possible to identify the links which are shared as part of tweets, of course, as well as identifying hashtags, @replies, and retweets. And tweets are exactly timestamped, allowing for close analysis of temppral developments.

Reykjavík.
The final session for the day at ECPR 2011 (well, before we go and hear from the President of Iceland) has a distinct Twitter theme, and starts with Greg Elmer. His focus is on the use of Twitter in the Canadian election debate of 2008, and on the question of how Twitter contributes to intensifying the permanent election campaign.

Reykjavík.
The next speaker at ECPR 2011 is Barbara Pfetsch, whose focus is on media agenda building in online and offline media. She suggests that research is needed to assess the impact of the Net on public debate: how could one go about this work? There have been hopes that the Net may lead to greater public participation and deliberation; also, however, what is the discursive opportunity structure which is provided by the Net? What is the potential for new civil society actors to enter the debate, and how may they be included in the process?

What theoretical and empirical approaches may be suited to researching these questions? First, there is an elite bias in traditional mass media; they tend to exclude ‘outside’, non-mainstream actors, and the hope is that the Net removes such biases. Second, media agenda building depends on local contexts: the political system, the media system, and the constellation of current conflicts in a country, for example. How does traditional media agenda setting change because of the Internet, as new challengers make their views heard?

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.

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: