The next speaker in this panel at the AoIR 2025 conference is my QUT colleague Laura Vodden, presenting her work on exploring LLM-assisted frame analysis of news coverage. This focusses here especially on Australian climate activism news coverage. The first challenge here, of course, is to understand framing, which usually includes a problem definition, suggested causes, proposed solutions, blame attribution, and and addressee for the solution. Such framing frequently occurs in news reporting.

Laura’s slides are here:

Frame analysis is a difficult and labour-intensive task, however; it requires critical engagement with complex material, and human coding is …

We start the first day of the AoIR 2025 conference proper with a panel on LLMs in research that involves several members of my QUT team. We start with a paper by Paul Pressmann, though, whose focus is on using LLMs in processing open-text responses from survey studies. The interest here is especially in questions of polarisation.

The data for this come from the POLTRACK project, which investigates the interrelations between individualised online information environments and polarisation. This combines Web tracking and surveys of some 2,000 participants. The survey component includes both closed- and open-ended questions that are used to …

It’s that time of the year, and I’ve made my annual pilgrimage to the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR), the single most important highlight of the academic year. This year we’re in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, and after the local welcomes we start the conference proper with a keynote by the great Marie Santini from NetLab at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, who is also a genuine Niterói local. She begins by revisiting the timeline of Internet studies: we have now reached a moment of great rupture (the theme of this year’s conference) …

And the final speaker at the SEASON 2025 conference, very fittingly, is our host Dirk Lewandowski, presenting findings from a study commissioned by the German State Media Authorities that focussed on the transformation of online search by the introduction of artificial intelligence technologies. This is of course still in progress, so no definitive results should be expected yet. The study was conducted in May 2025, and results will be published in mid-October.

But we can already reflect on whether the introduction of AI represents a revolutionary transformation, or merely an incremental change; and on how AI-enhanced search affects the economic …

My own paper starts the final session at the the SEASON 2025 conference, presenting the Australian Search Experience team’s work towards assessing the effect of search query formulation on the diversity of search results, within the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. Here are the slides: 

Day two of the SEASON 2025 conference in Hamburg starts with a keynote by Anne Beaulieu, reflecting on the purpose and future of search. Search is now transforming considerably, especially given the intrusion of generative AI into the contiguous mix of uses for search, the impact of disinformation, the receding of the public sphere, and the impossibility of opting out from these systems; there is an urgent need to respond to this by rethinking search.

The way that students now engage with search engines and generative AI tools, for instance, reveals some of these changes and points to many of …

The final speaker on this first day of the SEASON 2025 conference is Kristofer Söderström, exploring differences between conventional search and the use of ChatGPT as an alternative. For users, practical distinctions between these tools may increasingly blur, considering the embedding of these technologies into each other; users may prefer LLMs because of their turn-based interrogability, though, and trust them more readily because of the convincing way in which results are presented.

How might we research and understand these practices, then? Kristofer’s study examined how Reddit users compare and contrast ChatGPT and Google Search, collecting some 271 threads from r/ChatGPT …

The final speaker in this session at the SEASON 2025 conference is Nora Lindemann, who will focus especially on the role of Large Language Models in the information ecosystem. It’s important to note here that knowledge is embodied and situated, while information is broken-down knowledge that can be transferred through communication. This is also relational, where a relation is a connection between two entities that is constituted by their specific interaction and modulated by power.

Online information access is now rapidly changing, from (intransparently) algorithmically mediated conventional search results to the intrusion of AI-generated summaries into search results pages, or …

The next speakers in this session at the SEASON 2025 conference are Jutta Haider and Malte Rödl, whose interests are in what they call ignorance logics in search, with a particular focus on environmental issues. Algorithmic systems are involved in the shaping of knowledge, and of what is knowable and can be known; and societal responses to ecological crises, in particular, are now failing not so much because of a lack of knowledge but because of the possibility of ignorance. This is due in part also because of the curation of information by algorithmic black boxes.

Which worlds are made …