Here's one final update from the October conference tour, before we get back to covering new work: our research into the political uses of Twitter continues apace as well, of course, and during the AoIR and ECREA conferences Tim Highfield and I also had opportunities to discuss some of the recent findings from our observations of Twitter use at state and federal levels in Australia. At ECREA 2012 in Istanbul, we took part in a panel which brought together the participants in our new Norwegian-funded research project on social media and elections, as well as some additional friends and colleagues; our paper, co-authored with Stephen Harrington, explored the use of Twitter by candidates in the March 2012 Queensland state election (which at the time I also covered here at Mapping Online Publics – see the various blog posts for details). Slides and audio are below:
Political Networks on Twitter: Tweeting the Queensland State Election from Axel Bruns
Beyond the election context itself, Tim also led an investigation of the different patterns of participation in the federal and state hashtags #auspol, #qldpol, and #wapol, which found a number of notable differences between these communities – he presented this work at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Manchester. Here are his slides and audio:
#auspol, #qldpol, and #wapol: Twitter and the new Australian political commentariat from Tim Highfield
And that's all from our October 2012 conference season. For more impressions from both conferences, feel free to head over to snurb.info to see my live blog posts: here are my updates for AoIR and for ECREA.