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 …

New ARC Linkage project: Social media in times of crisis

This morning the Australian Research Council announced the latest round of major grant funding, and I’m pleased to be able to report some very good news. Along with our CCI colleagues Kate Crawford and Terry Flew, Axel and I were awarded funding for a Linkage Project on the uses of social media for crisis communication, …

Emergency Management Conference

I’m pushing my luck by heading down to Melbourne again tomorrow – hopefully without being held up by ash clouds, pilot strikes, or any other unforeseen disruptions, this time. I’m there to speak at the Emergence Management Conference, to present (again) on our research into the use of Twitter in particular and social media more …

Emergency Media and Public Affairs Conference

Hot on the heels of last week’s very successful Eidos Institute symposium on Social Media in Times of Crisis, in Brisbane, comes the Emergency Media and Public Affairs conference in Canberra; I’m flying down tomorrow to present an overview of our analysis of the Queensland floods (#qldfloods) and Christchurch earthquake (#eqnz) on Twitter. Looking forward …

Broader Twitter Patterns during Acute Events

Working through our available data on Twitter use during crisis events ahead of the Eidos Institute symposium on Monday, I started thinking about some of the broader patterns we are seeing. Very obviously, a good bit of the #hashtag activity around acute events is taken up with retweeting information – both simply passing it along …

Social Media in Times of Crisis

As we’ve mentioned in a previous post, Jean and I participated in the Eidos Institute symposium “Social Media in Times of Crisis” at the State Library of Queensland today – which turned out to be a great event that generated lots of new ideas and further possibilities for our research. Many thanks to all of …

Event: Social Media in Times of Crisis

A quick heads-up for our Australian-based readers: our work on researching social media use during the Queensland floods will be featured at a symposium in Brisbane on 4 April 2011, organised by the Eidos Institute. In addition to Jean, myself, and other colleagues from QUT and USQ, key presenters from emergency authorities and the mainstream …

Social Media and Emergencies, in German(y)

The German online magazine Politik-Digital, which covers issues relating to politics and the Internet, has just published a lengthy interview with me about the role of Twitter and other social media platforms during recent disasters, and about what German authorities may learn from recent experiences elsewhere – from the Queensland floods to the Christchurch earthquake …

Twitter in the Christchurch Earthquake, Pt. 3

We’ve spent the last couple of posts looking at user activity patterns on Twitter during the days following the Christchurch earthquake. Now it’s time to shift our attention to the themes discussed by the #eqnz hashtag community – again with particular attention also to how these themes change over time. What I’ve done here is …