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 …

Twitter in the Christchurch Earthquake, Pt. 2

Following on from my overview of key tweeting patterns in the Christchurch earthquake in February, in the previous post, I wanted to further explore Alfred Hermida’s idea of Twitter as ‘ambient journalism‘ – or more to the point, examine whether there are any obvious differences between Twitter’s coverage of the immediate earthquake and its long-term …

Twitter in the Christchurch Earthquake, Pt. 1

Given the recent focus on this blog on the use of social media during major disasters, a closer look at the use of Twitter during the devastating Christchurch earthquake on 22 Feb. 2011 is long overdue (and sadly, more on the horrible Japanese earthquake and tsunami will follow soon, too). I’m following our previous methodology …

Image sharing in the #qldfloods

In a previous post, I explained how to extract links to known image-hosting services from an archive of tweets, and promised to follow up with a substantial post on image-sharing in the Queensland Floods – this is that post. It’s pretty long, but it does have pictures. Here are the main points: During the Queensland …

Twitter Spoils the Oscars Party for Channel Nine

As something of a distraction from our recent focus on the role of social media during natural disasters, I thought I’d share a few observations on the use of Twitter during the Oscars broadcast a few days ago. In addition to their massive global TV audience, the 2011 Academy Awards also featured the #Oscars hashtag …

Extracting images from Twapperkeeper archives

This is just a quick post to share another new script – this one takes a list of tweets with pre-resolved URLs, and filters the list for known image-hosting services. I whipped this up as part of our ongoing efforts to go deeper into the dynamics of communication at various phases of the Queensland Floods …

Twitter Events in Perspective (updated)

Regular readers of this blog will know that we’ve now examined Twitter activity around a number of recent events in some detail – from the Labor leadership spill in Australian politics in June 2010 through to the subsequent election, to the recent floods in Queensland and beyond. On that basis, we now also in a …