Government

The second speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Eve Cheng, whose interest is in party structures in parliamentary networks – party structures here means personal and professional backgrounds, including military and civilian careers, party memberships, educational track records, etc.

The assumption here is that such backgrounds might determine party structures, predict electoral success, and affect policy-making. Key metrics here were average maximal flow (assessing the global network) and transitivity (focussing on local structures), and a comparison between these two networks is especially interesting.

In 1960s Australian Labor, for instance, there was one large trade unionist cluster, with one …

The next speaker in this ACSPRI 2024 conference session is Sair Buckle, whose interest is in the use of Large Language Models to detect bullying language in organisational contexts. Bullying is of course a major societal problem, including in companies, and presents a psychosocial hazard: there are several proposed approaches to address it, including surveys and interviews and manual linguistic classification (e.g. in federal parliament), which are subjective and manually intensive; pulse surveys and self-labelling questionnaires (e.g. in companies), which are subjective and limited in their data access; and there are technology-first approaches using LLMs and machine learning to detect …

The first session at the ACSPRI 2024 conference is on generative AI, and starts with Lachlan Watson. He is interested in the use of AI assistance to analyse public policy submissions, here in the context of Animal Welfare Victoria’s draft cat management strategy. Feedback could be in the form of written submissions, surveys, or both, and needed to be analysed using quantitative approaches given the substantial volume of submission.

The organisation chose Relevance AI as a tool for this – this is a low code AI solution not unlike ChatGPT, but data is hosted in a private environment and none …

From the AANZCA conference in Melbourne of the last few days I’ve moved on to the ACSPRI 2024 conference in Sydney for the rest of the week, which starts with a keynote by Maggie Walter, on methodologies for Indigenous statistics and quantitative research. Maggie is a Palawa woman from Tasmania. Data and population statistics have changed dramatically over the past decade or more; conventionally, Australian Indigenous people have been presented merely as average statistics that show what Maggie calls the Statistical Indigene: documenting prolonged disadvantage and inequality.

This is the case because these are the things we have data about …

I’m chairing the next session at the AANZCA 2024 conference, which is on disinformation and trolling. We start with Hanyu Zhang, with a paper on the Donald Trump assassination attempt and its discussion on the Chinese platform Douyin. In China, there has been a strong focus to ‘positive energy’ on social media, promoting core ideological values and nationalist narratives. This has also been applied to discussions of Donald Trump, where responding narratives highlighted both the challenges to China and the country’s resilience in the face of such challenges.

Douyin, whose international spinoff is TikTok, has been a crucial space for …

The final speakers in this AANZCA 2024 conference session are Saira Ali and Catherine Son, exploring Australian media’s response to counter-terrorism laws that limit press freedom. Such laws emerged in the post-9/11 era, and Australia has now passed a record 96 counter-terrorism laws since 2001 – these compound the lack of explicit provisions for press freedom under Australian law.

Any of these laws also impact on the Australian news media, so how have Australian media responded to security laws that restrict press and other freedoms, then? How have they responded especially to the ASIO Act, Metadata Retention laws, and the …

The next speaker in this AANZCA 2024 conference is Rumeng Cao, whose focus is on Facebook’s Oversight Board, an independent body introduced in response to increasingly critical scrutiny of the platform’s moderation and governance decisions following the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Such governance can be divided into three phases: thin self-regulation (until 2012), strengthened self-regulation (2012-18), and the Oversight Board era (from 2018).

This can also be analysed from the perspective of the relationship between discourse and institutions: institutions are manifested through their discursive practices, but they also exist in a field of power relationships between their various stakeholders. This is …