The next session at AoIR 2022 is on data infrastructures, and begins with Jonas Breuer, whose interest is in data protection in smart cities. Smart cities collect a substantial volume of often personal data all of the time, and the implementation of these data technologies needs to be thought through carefully; this project explored these issues through data walks in Belgian cities.

’Smart’ cities are often much less amazing than they sound, but Internet of Things technologies are now everywhere – there are even ‘smart’ rubbish bins, even if they don’t seem to work especially well just yet. In Europe …

If it’s Wednesday, this must be Aarhus, and I’m at the ECREA pre-conference on Digital Election Campaigning Worldwide, organised by the DigiWorld research network. Today, my QUT DMRC colleague Dan Angus and I presented our paper with Ehsan Dehghan, Nadia Jude, and Phoebe Matich on the use of social media during the 2022 Australian federal election campaign. Here are the slides:

I’m on my first conference trip since COVID hit, and currently at Konrad Adenauer’s old summer residence Villa La Collina in Cadenabbia, Italy, where we’ve just concluded the Digital Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres symposium ahead of the massive International Communication Association conference in Paris later this month. Many thanks to Ulrike Klinger and Uta Rußmann for organising the event, and the Adenauer Foundation for hosting us.

On behalf of my QUT Digital Media Research Centre colleagues Dan Angus, Tim Graham, Ehsan Dehghan and myself I presented a first take on social media the 2022 Australian federal election at this …

Last week saw the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), which also marked the end of my six-year tenure on the AoIR Executive (serving two years each as Vice-President, President, and Past President). AoIR remains my intellectual home, and I’ve had a great time in these roles, even in spite of the additional pressure that these past two pandemic years and the resulting need to move our annual conference to an entirely online format have provided – I’ve worked with three excellent Executive Committees, and I’m particularly proud of the way that we didn’t just move …