My own paper started the post-lunch session at the CCC Symposium, discussing our Mapping Online Publics work in the field of Twitter research. I'll post up the slides and audio properly as soon as I can!
The next speaker at the CCC symposium is the fabulous Nancy Baym, who begins by noting how overwhelming the buzz about 'big data' has become. There's a great deal of fascination just with the things we can do with big data sources - tracing interesting patterns, attempting to predict future processes, making sense of data by using algorithmic tools.
But the outcomes of such research often remain predictable: they show what we already knew (that various social factors influence each other, for example), and the close studies mean that wider context is often missed. Internet studies has always been very …
It’s that time of the year again, when I set off for the usual end-of-year round of conferences – and this year has turned out to be an especially busy one. As I write this, I’m already in Toronto for the inaugural workshop of a Canadian-funded, multi-partner research project on Social Media and Campaigning which is led by Greg Elmer of Ryerson University; this comes at an interesting time, of course, with electioneering south of the border in full swing. We’re already tracking the Twitter performance of both campaigns’ key accounts – more on that as it develops.
I’m please to say that a new article of mine has been published in Media International Australia (which means I’ve now had articles in consecutive MIA issues…). The issue in question, on “The ‘New’ News”, was edited by my QUT colleagues Stephen Harrington and Brian McNair, and looks like a bumper collection of exciting work – full details are here.
My article is on the use of Twitter by Australian journalists, looking especially at the Rudd/Gillard leadership spill in June 2010, and the federal election night in August. Below is the abstract – the full article is here …