The next speaker at Social Media & Society 2018 is Wasim Ahmed, whose focus is on discussions of infectious diseases on Twitter. Such diseases can be very deadly, and when outbreaks occur they lead to the public expression of people’s views and opinions via social media. There’s a need to further understand such communication processes, beyond mere metrics, through qualitative and mixed-methods approaches.

The present paper focusses especially on the peaks of the 2009 swine flu and 2014 Ebola outbreaks. What did English-language Twitter users discuss during these times, how do these events compare with each other, and are …

The final session at Social Media & Society 2018 starts with Supraja Gurajala, whose interest is in using Twitter data for responding to air quality issues. Air quality is a major health issue in population and industrial centres around the world, and metrics like the Air Quality Index (AQI) and Particulate Matter index (PM) are key to its assessment.

Air quality monitoring stations exist around the world, but are unevenly distributed. How might the gaps in monitoring be addressed by increasing the number of monitoring stations, given the costs involved in setup and maintenance, then? One option may be to …

We’re already deep into February 2017, but I thought I’d finally put together an overview of what I’ve been up to during the past year, at least as far as research outputs are concerned. It’s been a busy year by any measure, with a number of key projects coming to completion; research publications from some of these are still in production, but here’s what’s already come out.

Routledge Companion

Axel Bruns, Gunn Enli, Eli Skogerbø, Anders Olof Larsson, and Christian Christensen, eds. The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2016.

The year began with the release …

The final paper in this AoIR 2016 session is Mirca Madianou, who begins with a clip promoting the "I Sea" app that purports to take a crowdsourcing approach to scanning satellite images for migrant boats in the Mediterranean in order to spot and help boats in distress. However, that app was a scam; it showed static satellite images rather than live feeds.

The app plugs into the growing trend towards disaster crowdsourcing which goes back at least to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and there are a number of other such "apps for refugees"; we are now seeing a considerable change …

The next speaker at ECREA 2014 is Anssi Männistö, who shifts our focus to the Boston Marathon bomb attack. Mobile social media played an important role in covering this attact: tweets and mobile media were no longer just sources of information, but also tools to very facts and photos and to identify potential suspects, through image recognition software and other facilities.

In Boston, journalists rapidly discovered the first reports and images of the attack from Twitter, and soon came to use them in their own coverage. Such material was then used in official investigations, unofficial hunts for the culprits …

Now that I’m back in Australia from my extended conference trip, I immediately got back on a plane to travel to a freezing Melbourne, to present our social media research in crisis communication and beyond at the 2013 IBM Research Colloquium. Below are my slides and audio – many thanks again to Jennifer Lai and her team at IBM Research Australia for the invitation!

The final presenter in this AoIR 2013 session (and thus, the final presenter this year!) is Hazel Kwon, whose aim is to better understand the flows of communication on social media during protests. Her frame of research in this is Emergent Norm Theory, whose emphasis is on the rapid and transformative potential of word of mouth on collective behaviours. This is a process of diffusion for a collective identity.

Protests can be understood as collective behaviours. They may be prompted by the circulation of rumours, which are characterised by the informal and improvised circulation of situational information; gradually, key themes …