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)…
In recent years, a number of studies have developed more or less comprehensive maps of a range of national blogospheres: Adamic & Glance (2005) mapped the US political blogosphere against the backdrop of the 2004 presidential election campaigns, Kelly & Etling (2009) mapped the Iranian blogosphere, Linkfluence (2009) mapped the intersections between political bloggers in a number of major European countries in the lead-up to the EU parliament elections. A common feature of these studies was that they presented momentary snapshots of these blogospheres, and often focussed largely on explicitly political blogs. Moving beyond such limitations, it would be interesting to see, for example, how the Iranian blogosphere might have changed in the wake of the bloody conflicts following the country's disputed presidential elections, or how significant a role the discussion of EU politics might have assumed within the space of the overall blogospheres in various European nations.
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 …
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.
Blogs, and the networked systems of blogging known as "blogospheres", are now part of the landscape of public communication in Australia. However, much of the research into Australian blogging has focussed only on selected genres and topics of blogging - political blogs (Bruns, 2008), personal diaries, knitting blogs (Humphreys, 2008), fiction blogs (Thomas, 2006) -, but is unable to provide a more comprehensive overview of the relative interest in and interconnections between these topics and communities. As part of a three-year ARC Discovery project that assesses the contribution of blogs and other forms of user-created content to public communication, this paper discusses the methodological challenges in developing a more comprehensive list of Australian blogs which may be used by researchers to study the Australian blogosphere in a more systematic and inclusive manner.
My own paper with Jean Burgess on our Discovery project mapping Australian blogs (and online publics more generally) is next at ANZCA 2010. I'm including the Powerpoint below, and this time I think the audio recording worked as well, so I'll add this as soon as possible, too. with audio recording!
Wahey - we're in the last day of ICA 2010, which starts with a session on Web 2.0. Chien-leng Hsu is the first presenter, focussing on social link networks especially on Twitter. There are suggestions that offline and online relationships may be co-constructed; in Korea, in particular, many politicians are also using online media to communicate with their constituencies. Others suggests that online media are a fragmenting influence - but Twitter is also seen as an important tool for information dissemination.
This paper reports on a research program that has developed new methodologies for mapping the Australian political blogosphere (Bruns et al. 2009, 2008a/b; Kirchhoff et al. 2009). We improve on conventional Web crawling methodologies in a number of significant ways: First, we track blogging activity as it occurs, by scraping new blog posts when such posts are announced through RSS feeds, rather than by crawling existing content in the blogosphere after the fact. Second, we utilise custom-made tools that distinguish between the different types of content and thus allow us to analyse only the salient discursive content provided by bloggers, without contaminating our data with static links and ancillary material. Finally, we are able to examine these better-quality data by using both link network mapping and textual analysis tools, to produce both cumulative longer-term maps of interlinkages and themes across the blogosphere, and specific shorter-term snapshots of current activity which indicate clusters of heavy interlinkage and highlight key themes and topics being discussed within these clusters in the wider network.
