As 2011 winds down (which may also give me the time to do some more Gawk coding again – watch out for more updates soon), we’re still in the process of harvesting the results of our work over the last twelve months. Over the past few weeks, a clutch of articles based on our Mapping Online Publics research have finally seen the light of day:
- I’ve converted my exploration of dynamic @reply network mapping methods (detailed in a series of blog posts starting here) into an article in Information, Communication & Society: “How Long Is a Tweet? Mapping Dynamic Conversation Networks on Twitter Using Gawk and Gephi.” In the article as well as in the original blog posts, I’m using the 2010 Rudd/Gillard Australian Labor Party leadership spill – #spill on Twitter – as a case study.
- Our detailed examination of how the subsequent Australian federal election at the end of August 2010 played out on Twitter (under the #ausvotes hashtag), based on a series of blog posts starting here and presented at the InASA conference in Sydney almost exactly a year ago, has just come out in a special issue of Communication, Politics & Culture, as “#ausvotes: How Twitter Covered the 2010 Australian Federal Election.”
- Finally, stepping back from methods and case studies to consider the broader implications of real-time social media for journalistic practice: my keynote at the SBPJor conference in Rio de Janeiro at the start of November has now also been published (in English, alongside the other English-language keynotes) in the Brazilian Journalism Research journal, as “Gatekeeping, Gatewatching, Real-Time Feedback: New Challenges for Journalism.” The keynote itself (with audio) is online at snurb.info.
Full details on all our outputs on the publications page, as always.
And that’s (almost) it for 2011, I guess – from floods to fabulous new research collaborations, it’s been some year… Let’s hope 2012 turns out to be slightly more sedate. As you already know, we’ve got a new research project into the use of social media in crisis communication starting early in the year, in partnership with the Queensland Department of Community Safety and the Eidos Institute – more on that as it picks up speed. For now, here’s a QUT news story which has the key details.
And finally, heartfelt congratulations to Mapping Online Publics team member Tim Highfield, who was today awarded a PhD for his study of the Australian and French political blogospheres. An electronic copy of his thesis should show up on QUT ePrints very soon…