Progress in 2012
In 2012 the focus of the project has been on developing more comprehensive methodologies for the study of social media activities (especially on Twitter) at large scale and in close to real time, and on integrating such quantitative approaches with qualitative and especially ethnographic work. In addition to their continuing focus on the use of social media for crisis communication, the team have also developed a range of initiatives designed to investigate the interconnections between mainstream and social media both around popular culture and around politics, which have generated substantial national and international interest.
Individually and jointly, the team have generated a high level of publication and presentation outputs at international levels, including a large number of invited presentations and keynotes; their work has also resulted in successful applications for a number of competitive grants, including an ATN-DAAD project with the Institute for Communication and Media Research at the University of Munich and an SSHRC project with a range of partners across Canadian universities, led by Greg Elmer of Ryerson University. A number of further national and international grant applications are currently in train. The team have been successful at developing a collaborative research culture involving established research leaders, early career researchers, and postgraduate students, as well as external partners, leading to a large number of co-authored publications. With John Hartley, Burgess and Bruns have co-edited the Blackwell Companion to New Media Dynamics, to be published in early 2013, while Bruns and Burgess have collaborated with research partners at the University of Düsseldorf to edit Twitter & Society, also forthcoming in the first half of 2013. A special issue of the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, edited by Burgess, Hjorth and Bruns, will also arrive in 2013.
In 2013 we consolidate our research work to date, and extend it further towards a critical engagement with the current ‘big data’ trend in digital humanities research. Continuing our development of social media research methods and tools, we explore the feasibility of large-scale, real-time quantitative analysis of Twitter content, and of combining such approaches with more fine-grained, qualitative and ethnographic research. Additionally, we consider the broader implications of working with ‘big data’ sources which are often proprietary, frequently partial, and not always fully understood. Updating our 2010 analysis, we will again study the use of social media in the upcoming Australian federal election, and collaborate with our international partners in a comparative study of a range of European elections. Our crisis communication research also continues apace, and will feature in a conference organised by the Eidos Institute for April 2013.
New Knowledge Generated
Several project activities during 2012 have generated substantial new knowledge, and resulted in significant media attention. At the Digital Humanities Australasia conference in March we presented the first comprehensive map of the Australian Twittersphere, which was also featured in page three spreads in The Australian and the Australian Financial Review. We also established the Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX), which tracks user engagement with leading Australian news and commentary sites on an ongoing basis and found the Sydney Morning Herald and ABC News Websites to be the most significant Australian news sources whose articles are shared on Twitter; ATNIX results are published on a weekly basis at The Conversation.
Extending our work on methodological innovation, we developed a set of standard metrics for analysing user activities on Twitter, and presented these in a keynote at the Conference on Science and the Internet in Düsseldorf, Germany, in a special ICA-sponsored panel at the European Communication Conference (ECREA) in Istanbul, and in a series of journal articles. From this work emerge a number of regular patterns of user activity in different contexts (using Twitter as a backchannel for live media events; using Twitter as a tool in crisis communication) which we have explored in a range of follow-on projects. In particular, we extended our research into social media and crisis communication by publishing a major report into the role of @QPSMedia and #qldfloods in the 2011 Queensland floods (also featured in the Australian Research Council’s Annual Report 2011-2012), and explored the sharing of images during Hurricane Sandy in articles for The Guardian and The Conversation. Most of our methods, tools, and results have been documented in detail on the project website at http://mappingonlinepublics.net/, and have been the subject of various journal articles and conference presentations. Further methods papers are in preparation for a number of high-profile journal publications.