Media Ecologies and Methodological Innovation

This project will develop innovative interdisciplinary methods (and new ways of combining existing methods) for media and communication studies, in order to better map, track and analyse the changing media environment. It focuses on the increasingly complex relationships among professional media outlets, online social networks, and mobile media, and will map the methodological possibilities, implications, and asymmetries of working with the large data sets which can now be extracted from these diverse sources. The project will also develop improved data visualisation methods capable of representing the patterns and dynamics of change in media ecologies.

The specific aim of the project is to track how acute media events unfold across this complex media ecology. We will select a number of key media events (some foreseeable, like elections or reality TV campaigns, some unforeseen, like natural disasters and other crises) and explore their effects in the media through a number of baseline research questions (participant demographics, activity patterns over time, themes in mainstream and social media coverage). Individual researchers and teams participating in the project will address these questions for particular media platforms, illustrating the range and impact of specific methodological approaches and concerns across these platforms. Results and outcomes of these individual investigations will combine to form a shared stock of innovative methodologies and findings.

Progress in 2010
Officially starting in mid-2010, the Media Ecologies project has made good progress over the past months. We have done significant conceptual work to define the overall focus of the project, and developed a research plan for the coming year.
The immediate focus of our project is to investigate how acute events (both foreseeable events, like elections and short-term media phenomena, and unforeseeable crises, such as natural disasters or celebrity deaths) unfold across multiple media spaces, with a particular focus on the role of social media in relation to conventional media. With the support of JMRC RHD Frances Shaw as RA, we are undertaking a substantial review of existing literature theorising such acute events and crises, and will develop a first typology of distinct acute events on that basis; by early 2011 we will also complete a survey of existing methodologies for tracking acute events. This work proceeds alongside our ongoing in-house development of computer-assisted methods (partially in collaboration with Sociomantic Labs, Berlin).

Early in 2010, we also held a research workshop with a group of visiting scholars from National Chengchi University (NCCU), Taiwan, whose research is on the related area of crisis communication. This workshop was supported by a small ASSA-ISL grant, and is likely to lead to further grant applications.

Plans for 2011
Building on the work in 2010, we will apply our framework to a selection of diverse acute events, with particular focus both on how such events unfold in specific media, and on how event dynamics in various individual media intersect with one another (for example, whether and how social media discussion builds on conventional media coverage, and/or how activities in social media in turn affect mainstream media stories). In the context of acute media events, this will provide first insights into the interdependencies between the specific elements of the wider media ecology.
Further work especially on the interconnections between social and mainstream media will enable us to investigate the need and potential for transformations of existing media organisations, with a particular focus on public service media. Results of such research will be able to feed into planned research projects on the role of social media in the ABC, and comparative international studies (likely to involve researchers at the Hans-Bredow-Institut, Hamburg; the University of Urbino, Italy; the University of Oslo; and the Universität Münster).

Planned outcomes:
• Major literature review of approaches to the study of acute events (to be completed early 2011)
• Co-authored paper (A/A*) by Jean Burgess and Kate Crawford on crisis communication (early 2011)
• Several articles covering individual and comparative case studies of acute events (throughout 2011/12)
• Public forum/symposium on social media research methods with academic and industry researchers and practitioners (November 2011)
• Project group workshops: 2 per year, in Sydney and Brisbane (2011, 2012)
• Edited collection / special journal issue (A/A*) on acute events and methodological innovation (2012-13)
• Further grant applications on crisis communication (with NCCU) and public service media futures (2011/12)

Impact
Received Australian Social Sciences Academy – International Science Linkages (ASSA-ISL) grant to support research workshop with researchers from NCCU. An early dissemination outcome from this international collaboration was a panel entitled “Mediating Disaster”, jointly organised by Burgess, Crawford and NCCU colleague Yu-Chung Cheng, at the Association for Cultural Studies international conference Crossroads in Hong Kong, May 2010.

New Knowledge Generated
We are developing the ‘acute events’ model as an emerging framework for theorising the dynamics of media events and crises as they unfold across complex media ecologies, as well as developing appropriate qualitative and quantitative methodologies for tracking, capturing, analysing, and visualising such event dynamics.