Twitter, the Queensland Floods, and the ABC

And finally for our series of conference presentations over the past couple of weeks, here’s our talk from the Commonwealth Broadcasting Association conference in Brisbane last week. This was a bit of a strange one, as the conference schedule meant that we had to present it three times – Jean did the first one, and …

Twitter and Disaster Resilience: Lessons from #qldfloods and #eqnz

We’re doing quite a few presentations of our crisis communication research at the moment. A few days after our ANZDMC presentation, I flew down to Melbourne to run a workshop on social media and disaster resilience together with Chris Fisher from the Queensland state Department for Community Safety, as part of the Disaster Resilient Communities …

Earthquakes on Twitter: Analysing the Four Christchurch #eqnz Events

Continuing the catch-up with recent publications and presentations, I also wanted to share the paper which Jean Burgess and I presented at the Australia New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management conference in Brisbane last week. The paper (slides and audio are below) constitutes our most comprehensive analysis to date of the use of Twitter in …

Tracking Twitter: yourTwapperkeeper and Other Options

Well, it was about time we refreshed the look of Mapping Online Publics – hope you like it… A few posts on recent activities have been held up while we were working on the redesign, so expect some catch-up articles over the next little while. First off the rank: with one of our colleagues at …

Many Maps of the Australian Twittersphere

I spent most of last week at the Digital Humanities Australasia conference in Canberra (see my liveblog coverage), where I presented the latest iteration of our map of the Australian Twitter follower/followee network. This is now based on a total dataset of some 950,000 users, from which we’ve selected the most connected 120,000 for visualisation. …

CCI Report on #qldfloods and @QPSMedia in the 2011 Floods

It’s difficult to believe that one year ago, significant parts of Brisbane were inundated by floodwaters; thankfully, there has been no repeat of the flood crisis this year. One of the few good news stories to emerge from the disaster was the – overall, very successful – way in which social media such as Twitter …

Some New Publications

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 …

Twitter and Crises: #qldfloods, #eqnz, and #SJ

OK, it’s taken a little while, but we’ve now finally put all the presentations from our panel on social media and crisis communication at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Seattle in October online. Three of the four have audio as well – my apologies to our last presenter, Anders Larsson, but the batteries …

A Call to Action on Social Media Archiving

(Crossposted from snurb.info. Longer post there.) Briefly back in Australia, yesterday I went down to Sydney to speak at the Australian Society of Archivists’ 2011 Symposium (staged at the fabulous Luna Park venue). My paper was meant as an urgent call to action on the question of archiving public activities in social media spaces – …

Talking Crises in Perth

I was briefly in Perth on Friday, to present our research into the use of Twitter for crisis communication during recent natural disasters at the RightClick 2011 event organised by the Institute for Public Administration Australia. A stimulating day with some very interesting speakers – many thanks to the organisers for the invitation! Below are …