The Mapping Online Publics Team is currently busy at the CCI Winter School, but here, at least, are a handful of very quick updates. First, my colleagues Stephen Harrington, Tim Highfield and I have published a brief think piece in a volume published by the COST Action (a peculiarly bureaucratic name given to EU-funded research networks) on Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies. In our contribution to the volume on Audience Interactivity and Participation, edited by José Manuel Noguera, we outline the dimensions of interleaving Twitter interaction with the television experience. You can find our essay “More than a Backchannel: Twitter and Television” in the freely available PDF.
And on a very different note, a couple of weeks ago I travelled to Melbourne to participate in The Arab Spring: A Symposium on Social Media and the Politics of Reportage, at Swinburne University, where I presented a paper co-authored with Jean Burgess and Tim Highfield that presents more details on our exploration of language communities in the #egypt and #libya hashtags during 2011. Below are my slides (with audio), which draw on my previous blog post on distinguishing character sets in tweets. A full article will be published later.