Gothenburg.
The final speaker in our social media mapping session at AoIR 2010 is my excellent PhD student Tim Highfield, whose focus is on comparing the French and Australian political blogospheres. Here, he’s examining blog network mapping, which enables an investigation of links, affiliations, friendships, clusters, references, and oppositions between blogs; this can also easily lead to simply pretty visualisations which ultimately don’t tell us much, however.

Strengths are that larger and longer-term datasets can be created, and dominant groups can be identified over time – however, many studies still focus on all links on a page, rather than only on the discursive links in blog posts and/or the static affiliations in blogrolls. for example. Additionally, it would also be used to distinguish supportive and oppositional links, and to weight repeated links more strongly than less frequent interlinkage.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker in our social media mapping panel at AoIR 2010 is Christian Nuernbergk, whose interest is in tracking and mapping political interaction in online social networks. This is driven by the ‘concentration of attention’ debate: people like Yochai Benkler suggest that new online platforms provide a greater space for people to engage in discussion and conversation, while someone like Matthew Hindman claims that the Web exhibits a ‘rich get richer’ phenomenon where audiences end up concentrated around a handful of sites.

So, in Germany, which Websites benefit the most from the emerging network; how centralised is the link structure? This study worked with a dataset from Linkfluence Germany, which had already mapped the German political Web for the last election and now repeated its Web crawl to determine the overall link network. Various attributes of network actors were automatically generated, and reviewed by researchers at the University of Münster.

Gothenburg.
The next speaker in our social media mapping panel at AoIR 2010 is Hallvard Moe, whose focus is on Twitter as an arena for public debate in Norway, around the data retention policy debate in that country. Norway is traditionally a social-democratic state with relatively advanced use of ICTs, apparently including some 160,000 Twitter users; this also meant that there was substantial debate about the adoption of the EU data retention directive (for regularly archiving phone and network data).

Hallvard archived tweets on the #dld hashtag using Twapperkeeper, between April and early August 2010, resulting in some 12,000 tweets (though not all relevant tweets in Norway may have used the #dld hashtag, of course). Activity on the topic was spread across the entire time period, at relatively low but persistent levels. There are a number of key peaks, especially around 9 May (the conservative party’s congress); tweets around that day anticipated party decisions as well as commenting on the day’s events.

Gothenburg.
My own paper (with Jean Burgess, Thomas Nicolai, and Lars Kirchhoff) starts the final session of this second day at AoIR 2010. Below is the Powerpoint, and I’ll try to add the audio some time soon the audio is online now, too.

Hamburg.
My own paper was next at ECREA 2010. Here’s the presentation – and I also recorded the audio for it, and will add it as soon as I can which is now attached to the slides. As it turned out, one of the other presenters in the session also broadcast the whole event to Justin.tv – so go there to see it all in action (my presentation starts around 52 minutes in, and you can also see the other papers on our panel)…

Bremen.
The next speaker at ‘Doing Global Media Studies’ is my CCI colleague Jean Burgess, presenting on our Mapping Online Publics research project; this presentation is the methodological part, and I’ll show some more results at the main ECREA 2010 conference later in the week. Our research is part of an ARC Discovery project exploring methods for examining Australian social media use – the aim is to develop methods for computer-assisted cultural analysis. Over the course of the three years, we’ll examine blogs, Twitter, Flickr, and YouTube.

Here’s Jean’s Powerpoint, and my transcript is below, too. I’ll add the audio later.

Just a quick plug for yet another project blog: as regular readers of this blog may know, with my colleague Jean Burgess and our collaborators Lars Kirchhoff and Thomas Nicolai at Sociomantic Labs I was successful in winning an ARC Discovery grant in last year’s round, for a three-year project aiming to map public communication in Australia across a range of social media spaces.

With the project now getting underway in earnest (and we’ve already presented our methodology and early outcomes at a number of conferences), Jean and I have now set up Mapping Online Publics as a blog to cover our research methods and outcomes.