Postdoc and PhD Positions Available: Social Media and the Public Sphere

At Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, where we’re based, we’re currently advertising two new positions relating to our research: a Postdoctoral Research Fellow (two years full-time) and a PhD researcher (including a three-year stipend). Both of these are associated with Axel Bruns’s ARC Future Fellowship project Understanding Intermedia Information Flows in the Australian …

ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, March 2015

Compared to the excitement of January and February, March 2015 has turned out to be a comparatively quiet month in Australian public life, even in spite of the New South Wales state election campaign which culminated in the re-election of Mike Baird’s Coalition government on 28 March. The immediate heat has dissipated from the leadership …

ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, February 2015

February 2015 has been a tumultuous month in Australian news, not least because of the continuing leadership debate (and defeated spill motion) in the federal Liberal Party following the LNP’s unexpected defeat in the Queensland state election on 31 January. As expected, these and other events also affect the patterns observed in our Australian Twitter …

ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, January 2015

Ordinarily, January is a relatively slow news month in Australia. That’s far from true for January 2015, however: first, the Queensland premier Campbell Newman surprised journalists, the opposition, and quite a few of his own colleagues by calling an almost unprecedentedly early state election. Then, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s “captain’s call” of awarding a knighthood …

#libspill: A Helpful Social Media Overview

You might have been forgiven for thinking that the time between the Queensland state election in January and the New South Wales state election in March would be a little quiet, politically speaking – with the incumbent Queensland government on an overwhelming majority and the NSW government facing no serious challenge to date. As we …

#qldvotes: A Final Social Media Round-Up

By any measure, it’s been an extraordinary weekend here in Queensland. The same electoral tsunami that brought the LNP to power in March 2012 has washed the government away again in January 2015. Premier Campbell Newman has lost his own seat of Ashgrove, and Labor leader Annastacia Palaszczuk looks poised to form government – although …

#qldvotes: Final-Week Update on Social Media Activities

This year’s Queensland state election campaign may be very brief, but it’s certainly been action-packed. In my previous post I provided an overview of what were roughly the first two weeks of the campaign; mid-way through the final week, here’s a further update of how the social media campaign has unfolded. As a reminder about …

Twitter in the Queensland State Election, Two Weeks In

Somewhat earlier than expected, Queensland finds itself in the throes of a very tightly contested state election campaign, which was called on 6 January and concludes with election day on 31 January. Just like candidates and the media, we in the QUT Social Media Research Group too have been scrambling to put in place the …

ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, December 2014

The final ATNIX for 2014 arrives with a slight delay due to the summer holidays, but covers an unexpectedly dramatic few weeks in Australian public life, due especially to the deadly siege in the Lindt Café in Sydney’s Martin Place in mid-December. This major breaking news story and its tragic aftermath are clearly reflected in …

ATNIX: Australian Twitter News Index, November 2014

With the drama and excitements of the Melbourne Cup and G20 summit receding into memory, and the current trials and tribulations of the federal government taking centre-stage once again, it’s time to update our Australian Twitter News Index (ATNIX) for the month of November. Sadly, scheduled server maintenance has meant that we’ve missed out on …