Related to this work, and the ARC Discovery research project that supports it, we are now also calling for expressions of interest in a three-year PhD scholarship on mis- and disinformation in social media, which will commence in early 2021. Please get in touch with me if you’re interested in the scholarship:

PhD Scholarship: ARC Discovery project on Mis- and Disinformation in Social Media (PhD commencing 2021)

The QUT Digital Media Research Centre is offering a three-year PhD scholarship associated with a major ARC Discovery research project on mis- and disinformation in social media. Working with DMRC research leaders Axel Bruns, Stephen Harrington, and Dan Angus, and collaborating with Scott Wright (Monash University, Melbourne), Jenny Stromer-Galley (Syracuse University, USA), and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen (Cardiff University, UK), the PhD researcher will use qualitative and quantitative analytics methods to investigate the dissemination patterns and processes for mis- and disinformation.

Ideally, the PhD researcher should be equally familiar with qualitative, close reading as well as quantitative, computational research methods. They will draw on the state-of-the-art social media analytics approaches to examine the role of specific individual, institutional, and automated actors in promoting or preventing the distribution of suspected ‘fake news’ content across Australian social media networks. Building on this work, they will develop a number of the case studies of the trajectories of specific stories across the media ecosystem, drawing crucially on issue mapping methods to produce a forensic analysis of how particular stories are disseminated by a combination of fringe outlets, social media platforms and their users, and potentially also by mainstream media publications.

Interested candidates should first contact Prof. Axel Bruns (a.bruns@qut.edu.au). You will then be asked to complete the DMRC EOI form (https://research.qut.edu.au/dmrc/dmrc-eois-2020-annual-scholarship-round/), by 31 August. We will assess your eligibility for PhD study, and work with you to develop a formal PhD application to QUT’s scholarship applications system, by 30 October. The PhD itself will commence in early 2021. International applicants are welcome.

The DMRC is a global leader in digital humanities and social science research with a focus on communication, media, and the law. It is one of Australia’s top organisations for media and communication research, areas in which QUT has achieved the highest possible rankings in ERA, the national research quality assessment exercise. Our research programs investigate the digital transformation of media industries, the challenges of digital inclusion and governance, the growing role of AI and automation in the information environment, and the role of social media in public communication. The DMRC has access to cutting-edge research infrastructure and capabilities in computational methods for the study of communication and society. We actively engage with industry and academic partners in Australia, Europe, Asia, the US, and South America; and we are especially proud of the dynamic and supportive research training environment we provide to our many local and international graduate students.

Also involving Assoc. Prof. Dan Angus and Dr Tobias Keller, the team is currently investigating the origins and spread of major conspiracy theories associated with the COVID-19 crisis across various social media platforms. Such conspiracy theories include false stories about coronavirus as a bioweapon created either in a Wuhan lab or by researchers associated with the Gates Foundation, and about connections between coronavirus and the roll-out of 5G mobile telephony technology.

Early results from this research point to the presence of a small but sustained coordinated effort by a network of Twitter accounts that pushed the bioweapon conspiracy story; such accounts were often associated with fringe political perspectives especially in the United States. Further, the research indicates that these conspiracy theories typically spread beyond the fringes of public discussion only once they are picked up and amplified by tabloid media exploiting them as clickbait, or by celebrities from the fields of music, movies, and sports who share them with their substantial social media audiences.

The research, which will be presented in extended form in a report for the Centre for Responsible Technology and subsequent scholarly publications, points to important inflection points in the trajectory of conspiracy theories from the fringes to the mainstream, and highlights a need both for further platform intervention against coordinated inauthentic behaviour and for the development of greater digital literacies not least also amongst influential social media users.

In early 2020, we substantially updated the underlying ATNIX architecture. Most importantly, we now reduce the various URLs that may lead to the same story to a single canonical URL, in order to arrive at a reliable count for how often a story has been shared (rather than just how often a particular URL variation has been shared). This has become necessary because many news sites incorporate part of the story headline into its URL – but headlines may change after publication, and so multiple different URLs may point to the same story in the end.

ATNIX tracks the sharing of stories from most major Australian news outlets – from ABC News to New Matilda and beyond. We exclude international outlets with an Australian presence (such as The Guardian Australia or Mail Online Australia), because the majority of their content originates from outside of Australia, but we continue to include The Conversation because it remains Australian-based and sources a substantial amount of its content from Australian authors. The data gathered for ATNIX include all tweets, by Australian as well as international Twitter accounts, that link to the domains of these Australian news outlets. From these, we exclude links to their homepages as well as to non-news content.

The ATNIX Twitter account (@_ATNIX_) posts half-daily, daily, and weekly updates on trending Australian news stories, and ATNIX also provides an interactive dashboard with live and historical data on sharing patterns for Australian news, at and above. In earlier years, ATNIX analysis was published in a regular column in The Conversation (https://theconversation.com/columns/axel-bruns-1433).

The Australian Twitter News Index has reported on patterns in the sharing of Australian news content through Twitter for many years; it has documented the overall stability of Australian Twitter users’ preferences for specific news sources (especially ABC News and the Sydney Morning Herald), tested the overlap in content-sharing audiences between news outlets with different editorial and ideological orientations, and reported on the most popular news stories during specific timeframes.

Datasets analogous to ATNIX are also being collected for Germany, the Nordic countries, Spain, and a selection of suspected sources of mis- and disinformation.

Key scholarly discussions of ATNIX and its data can be found in:

Bruns, A. (2016). Big Data Analysis. In T. Witschge, C. W. Anderson, D. Domingo, & A. Hermida (Eds.), The Sage Handbook of Digital Journalism (pp. 509-527). Sage. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/102642/

Bruns, A. (2017). Making Audience Engagement Visible: Publics for Journalism on Social Media Platforms. In B. Franklin & S. A. Eldridge II (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Digital Journalism Studies (pp. 325-334). Routledge. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/102644/

For further questions about ATNIX and its datasets, please contact the project leader, Prof. Axel Bruns.

This builds on our prior work to identify Australian Twitter accounts and map the network structure of the Australian Twittersphere (covered at The Conversation and published in Social Media + Society), and tracks the public posting activities of some 500,000 Australian Twitter accounts on a continuous, real-time basis. For this general overview, we’re pulling out the major hashtags and the most mentioned accounts (counting both @mentions and retweets) – but of course the underlying dataset captures far more than this.

If you’re interested in further research that builds on this dataset, please get in touch!

(Click ‘full screen’ to enlarge.)

The Australian Twittersphere in 2016: Mapping the Follower/Followee Network

Twitter is now a key platform for public communication between a diverse range of participants, but the overall shape of the communication network it provides remains largely unknown. This article provides a detailed overview of the network structure of the Australian Twittersphere and identifies the thematic drivers of the key clusters within the network. We identify some 3.72 million Australian Twitter accounts and map the follower/followee connections between the 255,000 most connected accounts; we utilize community detection algorithms to identify the major clusters within this network and examine their account populations to identify their constitutive themes; we examine account creation dates and reconstruct a timeline for the Twitter adoption process among different communities; and we examine lifetime and recent tweeting patterns to determine the historically and currently most active clusters in the network. In combination, this offers the first rigorous and comprehensive study of the network structure of an entire national Twittersphere.

A summary of some of the study’s key findings was published in The Conversation in May 2017. Meanwhile, a paper by Axel Bruns at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in September 2017 built on this new Twittersphere map to test for the existence of echo chambers and filter bubbles in Australian Twitter – and found little evidence to support the thesis:

Echo Chamber? What Echo Chamber? Reviewing the Evidence

The success of political movements that appear to be immune to any factual evidence that contradicts their claims – from the Brexiteers to the ‘alt-right’, neo-fascist groups supporting Donald Trump – has reinvigorated claims that social media spaces constitute so-called ‘filter bubbles’ or ‘echo chambers’. But while such claims may appear intuitively true to politicians and journalists – who have themselves been accused of living in filter bubbles –, the evidence that ordinary users experience their everyday social media environments as echo chambers is far more limited.

For instance, a 2016 Pew Center study has shown that only 23% of U.S. users on Facebook and 17% on Twitter now say with confidence that most of their contacts’ views are similar to their own. 20% have changed their minds about a political or social issue because of interactions on social media. Similarly, large-scale studies of follower and interaction networks on Twitter show that national Twitterspheres are often thoroughly interconnected and facilitate the flow of information across boundaries of personal ideology and interest, except for a few especially hardcore partisan communities.

Building on new, comprehensive data from a project that maps and tracks interactions between 4 million accounts in the Australian Twittersphere, this paper explores in detail the evidence for the existence of echo chambers in that country. It thereby moves the present debate beyond a merely anecdotal footing, and offers a more reliable assessment of the ‘echo chamber’ threat.

Part of the problem here is that we all design our own filter bubbles, as the journalism researcher Paul Bradshaw has put it: what two random users see of Twitter might be entirely different, depending on what other accounts they choose to follow. If all you ever see is food porn, perhaps you’d care to make some new connections. Or perhaps that’s what you’re there for.

But if we could look beyond our own, personal networks, what would we see? What are the major drivers of Twitter take-up, in Australia and elsewhere? Do we connect around shared interests, shared location, or pre-existing offline relationships? And when, in the eleven-year history of the platform, did these structures form?

These are the questions that guided a new, long-term study of the Australian national Twittersphere that my colleagues and I have undertaken. Drawing on TrISMA, a major multi-institutional facility for social media analytics, we identified some 3.7 million Australian Twitter accounts in existence by early 2016, and captured the 167 million follower/followee connections they have amongst each other.

Twitter took off in Australia in 2009, some three years after its launch, and saw a fairly steady sign-up rate of 1,000-2,000 new accounts between 2010 and 2014. Growth has slowed since then, and this may indicate market saturation. There are a number of obvious spikes in new account sign-ups, too: the series of natural disasters in early 2011 attracts users to the platform who recognise its role in crisis communication, and the political turmoil of 2013 also seems to drive take-up.

A major spike in 2015 appears to coincide with the devastating Nepal earthquake, but we’ve yet to determine why that event would lead to new Twitter accounts being created in Australia.

To focus in on the core parts of the network, we further filtered this to accounts that have at least 1,000 connections in the global Twittersphere, which left us with the 255,000 best-connected accounts. We visualised their network using Gephi’s Force Atlas 2 algorithm, which places accounts close to each other if they share many connections, and further apart if they are only poorly connected.

The network map shows clear clustering tendencies: dense regions, where many accounts are closely connected, are separated from each other by lower-density spaces. We systematically examined these clusters, and labelled them based on the overarching themes that emerged from an analysis of the account profiles in each cluster. The result is a kind of birds-eye view of the Twitter landscape, from politics to popular culture and from education to sports.

Perhaps surprisingly, accounts connecting around teen culture make up the largest part of this network: 61,000 of our 255,000 accounts are located here. Other major clusters include aspirational accounts (these include self-declared social media gurus, self-improvement and life-coaching practitioners, and others who sought to use Twitter for professional betterment), at 26,000 accounts; sports, with 25,000 accounts (including distinct sub-clusters for cycling and horse racing); and netizens, technologists, and software developers (17,000 accounts).

Shared interests emerge from this as the central drivers of our connections on Twitter: for the most part, we follow others because of the topics they cover, not because they’re from the same city or state or because we already know them offline. An equivalent map for Facebook, where connections are much more strongly based on prior acquaintance, would likely look very different.

We further found that these accounts also arrived on Twitter at very different times: both netizen and aspirational accounts were created very early in the history of the platform. As expected, netizens constituted the vast majority of Australia’s early adopters, with aspirational accounts close behind; fully half of the population in both these clusters had arrived on Twitter by mid-2010. Sports took a year longer, and may well have been helped along by Twitter Australia itself as it reached out to key sporting codes to get their teams and players signed up.

By contrast, the teen culture accounts arrived a great deal later. It took until mid-2012 until half that cluster’s population had joined – the teen invasion of Twitter represents a secondary adoption event, following the first big influx of Australian users in 2009/10. Here, too, we suspect active encouragement from key bands like One Direction and Five Seconds of Summer as a major driver.

In spite of Twitter’s reputation as a space for political debate and agitation, politics attracts only some 13,000 accounts (including 1,500 that form a separate, staunchly right-wing cluster); there’s a great deal more to Twitter than political argument.

But if all you ever see on Twitter is partisan bickering, there may be a reason: per capita, the political accounts are some of the most active in the Australian Twittersphere. Over their lifetimes, they’ve posted an average of 7.2 tweets per day (and the accounts in the hard right cluster even manage 12.5 per day); in the turbulent first quarter of 2017, those averages are even higher. Most of the other major cluster communities have managed less than half that work rate; historically, only the teen culture accounts have been similarly active.

Twitter is what its users make it, and Australian users have made it a diverse and dynamic place, even if perhaps they’re less aware of each other than they should be. As users, we should step beyond our networks more often, to avoid becoming trapped in our own filter bubbles – and this goes doubly for politicians, journalists, and others who now treat their immediate Twitter networks as an instant source of popular opinion.

And as a company, Twitter too has much work to do to enable its users to experience the full variety of networked communication and culture that the platform has to offer. Changes to how it recommends new accounts to follow, and how it reveals trending topics outside of our existing networks, could help a great deal in combatting the threat of getting stuck in your own filter bubble.

It doesn’t stop there, of course. We can only speculate what the equivalent networks for Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat would look like, and what they might tell us about how people are using these platforms.

(An edited version of this article was published in The Conversation on 3 May 2017.)

That’s why archaeological finds of items as mundane as the cuneiform tablets of ancient Uruk, recording the inventories of its food stores, or the pot shards of Deir el-Medina, providing medical prescriptions for the workers of Egypt, are so valuable – they offer direct glimpses of how ordinary people lived and worked during those times.

But even in much more recent, much better-documented times, historians have still had to go to great lengths to gather the documentary evidence required to fully understand historical events and actors. From the US Civil War to the Holocaust and beyond, they have initiated projects to collect the letters written by ordinary people during extraordinary times – and of course they also draw on print, radio, and TV journalism, if those records are still available.

Beyond Journalism’s Draft of History

Indeed, journalism has long been described as “a first rough draft of history”: collectively, what they report on represents journalists’ first take not only on what their readers, listeners and viewers need to know now, but also on what is relevant to record for the future.

But in a complex world, such judgments are rarely straightforward. The reality of anthropogenic climate change has taken years, even decades to sink in – and some people, including some journalists, still choose to live in denial. The domino effect leading from unsound lending practices in the US mortgage market to the election of the Syriza government in Greece would have been difficult to foresee, and so the early stages of the crisis received less coverage than in hindsight they should have. And the various impacts of these developments on the lives of millions around the world cannot be documented by journalists alone.

Neither, these days, do they need to be. The past decade has seen an unprecedented shift towards what Manuel Castells has described as “mass self-communication” via social media. Hundreds of millions of users around the world are publicly or semi-publicly recording what matters to them, from (apparently) mundane activities to major world events.

News of earthquakes in Nepal and terror attacks in Paris now breaks on Twitter even before journalists have arrived at the scene, and some events – such as the attack on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan – were even covered purely by accident, as bystanders remarked on the unusual military activity in the area. Elsewhere, the immense social media response to events from the British royal wedding to the death of Prince serves as a better reflection of public sentiment than any obituary ever could.

In their ability to instantly gather and coordinate the collective public response to current events, then, social media don’t just write history. They represent something much more immediate: social media are a first draft of the present, as my colleague Katrin Weller and I argue in a paper for the Web Science conference in Hannover in May 2016. But like all drafts, theirs is fragile and easily lost – a loss which, we believe, would impact significantly on future historians’ ability to understand the story of humanity in the early twenty-first century.

What follows from this is an acute need to address the preservation of social media content. This is complicated by the considerable volume and rapid growth of such archives, and the inherently proprietary nature of the leading social media platforms: both create substantial technical and organisational challenges for any large-scale archiving project.

Current Archiving Projects

Perhaps the most widely known social media archiving project commenced when in 2010, Twitter ‘gifted’ a continuous archive of all public tweets since its launch in 2006 to the US Library of Congress. Beyond the initial fanfare, which generated some much-needed positive PR for Twitter, not much more progress appears to have been made, though. A 2013 update on the Library’s blog made positive noises about the development of the archive, but by 2015 researchers still hadn’t been granted access. Washington insiders Politico called the Library’s Twitter archiving project “a huge #FAIL”, blaming the Library’s poor understanding of emerging technologies.

Closer to home, the Australian Research Council has funded the TrISMA project (which I lead), which has built the infrastructure to track the public posting activities of the nearly three million Australian Twitter accounts identified so far, and the public debates unfolding on Australian Facebook pages. To date, it has captured more than one billion tweets posted by Australians. Led by Queensland University of Technology and supported by a consortium of Australian universities, the project also collaborates with the National Library of Australia, which will eventually house an archive of the full collection, and preserve it for future use.

Such projects must necessarily be speculative in their approach to archiving social media’s first draft of the present. The future remains largely unpredictable, and we cannot foresee which part of the social media record future historians may be interested in. Where will the next Curie or Einstein, the next Björk or Bowie, the next Obama or Malala come from? We don’t know, but we’ll want to preserve their own social media activities, as well as the public response to them.

The best solution is therefore to capture all that we can, as comprehensively as we can, and to let those future historians make their own choices from the available record. Some might argue that platforms like Facebook and Twitter themselves already do so: that their proprietary archives are necessarily the most comprehensive, and that no additional archiving efforts are required. But because they are proprietary, these archives are largely closed even to publicly funded, public-interest research – and their longer-term survival is inherently tied to the fortunes of the companies that own them. As past cases from GeoCities to MySpace have shown, even Facebook and Twitter may not be around forever.

The great journalism scholar Herbert Gans once wrote that, as they choose what information makes it into their first draft of history, “the news may be too important to leave to the journalists alone”. The same is true for social media: its first draft of the present is too important to leave to social media platforms to preserve. It’s high time to address the task of building comprehensive archives of our public communication through social media, in order to document our present for the benefit of future generations.

As the worst bushfires seen for generations in New South Wales raged across the Blue Mountains, Southern Highlands and the Central Coast two years ago, people urgently needed fast, reliable information – and many turned to their phones to get it.

The NSW Rural Fire Service was prepared with a smartphone app, Fires Near Me, which was downloaded almost 200,000 times. At the height of the fires, its Facebook page was recording more than a million views an hour.

A social media campaign also helped the NSW Rural Fire Service Facebook community more than double from 120,000 to 280,000, while its Twitter reach jumped from 20,000 to 37,000 followers. Crucially, this helped to alert people to danger areas and places to avoid driving near.

If every emergency in Australia was handled in that way, Australians would be better able to cope with disasters we face, including fires, floods and storms.

But our new policy report, released today, shows that there’s still much more to do to consistently match the 2013 response to the NSW fires across the nation.

We found that while Australia is a leader in uses of social media for crisis communication within emergency management organisations, much activity is still relatively ad hoc, rather than being systematically embedded within, or effectively coordinated across, agencies.

Australia also lacks frameworks to enable agencies in one place to learn from the experiences in other parts of the country. That might not sound important – but in times of acute crisis, such disconnects between emergency agencies can cost lives.

Based on a three-year study on how improve social media for crisis communication, our Support Frameworks for the Use of Social Media by Emergency Management Organisations report makes four key recommendations for Australia, to:

• Develop a national framework for best practices for social media use in crises
• Create a national network of Australian emergency management organisations’ social media practitioners
• Improve coordination of federal, state and local government agencies
• Develop a federal government social media task force.

Photo from @robrfs of Ingleside brigade working on Bells Line of Road preventing fire escaping. Great work! #nswfires pic.twitter.com/EUE5Gtsr9N

— NSW RFS (@NSWRFS) October 25, 2013

Disaster-Ready Social Media

The NSW Rural Fire Service is just one of a growing number of emergency management organisations around the world using social media to provide emergency warnings, promote community meetings, and use photographs shared by the public on social media to identify and act on crisis hot-spots.

Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have played a crucial role in many other recent disasters, including the Christchurch earthquakes, the 2011 Queensland floods, Hurricane Sandy in the US, the Japanese earthquake and tsunami, and the 2015 Nepalese earthquake.

Individuals, community groups and emergency management organisations have all recognised the value of sharing information and advice about rapidly unfolding disasters. Content mined from social media platforms is now being incorporated into the overall event picture by emergency management organisations.

But Australian authorities could do better, as our report shows.

Institutional support for the use of social media by emergency management organisations in Australia is still variable, and often depends on the personal enthusiasm of leaders within those organisations. That’s why we need to instead establish a national framework for the use of social media in crisis communication, so that everyone learns from those leading the way, such as the NSW Rural Fire Service and the Queensland Police Service.

Twitter users can activate emergency alerts from the Queensland Police Service and others. https://twitter.com/QPSmedia/alerts

There is also an urgent need for better knowledge sharing across the many local, state, and federal organisations involved with crisis communication. So we recommend the creation of a national network of social media units within emergency management organisations, which could also oversee the development of accredited professional training options.

The rich experience that exists within the network could then be pooled and documented in a national resource centre. We recommend the establishment of a central coordinating office to operate the network, placed at the COAG level, within the already established Australia-New Zealand Emergency Management Committee.

Find out more about the best way to stay up to day on warnings and forecasts from the Bureau of Meteorology. http://media.bom.gov.au/social-media/

Lessons learnt from the increasing use of social media as a key channel for crisis communication are valuable for many other forms of government communication.

Our report also recommends the establishment of a federal government Social Media Task Force, to explore, encourage, and develop more innovative approaches to using social media across all relevant government functions.

Promotion of other social media services, such as the Bureau of Meteorology’s BOM alerts, would boost the community’s capacity to respond to extreme weather warnings, helping save lives and better protecting homes, businesses and belongings.

Working with the public on social media

Worldwide, emergency organisations’ use of social media in crisis situations is still at a relatively early stage. In that time, important advances have been made in Australia. But there is considerable scope to do even better in future.

As the US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s director Craig Fugate has observed, successful emergency management requires working with the public as part of a team. Reflecting on the lessons learned from Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Fugate said that:

if you wait until you know how bad something is to begin a response, you have lost time.

After the hottest October on record in many parts of Australia, and with an El Niño event now occurring in the Pacific Rim, it is likely that we will once again see a summer of bushfires, storms, floods and cyclones.

Social media is not a panacea; other ways of sharing emergency warnings including radio broadcasts are still crucial.

But social media has become another essential way for authorities to share and discover potentially life-saving information in a disaster. If emergency organisations work together more effectively, and are better engaged with their local communities through social media before, during and after a crisis, it could prove the difference in times when every second counts.

There are three major stories in this campaign:

1. Who will form government? The incumbent Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition are fighting the election separately, and frequently in opposition to each other. Experts and polls suggest that a whole range of outcomes are possible, including both majority government for the Conservatives and Labour, however the smart money suggests either a minority government (7/4 Labour, 5/2 Conservatives) or a coalition. Amongst the coalition options, a renewal of the Conservative / Liberal Democrat coalition is possible (6/1), as is a partnership between the Liberal Democrats and Labour (13/2). The Scottish Nationals are another possible coalition partner for Labour (16/1 or 20/1 with the Lib Dems also included), while UKIP and the Democratic Unionists may still be needed to get either party over the line. Unusually for the UK then, we have a lot of electoral calculus in play.
2. How will Scotland vote? As above, the SNP may play a role in a coalition, but Scotland seems set to vote on very different grounds from the rest of the UK. A recent poll suggested that almost half of both Labour and Conservative voters would consider tactically voting for the other major (English) party, if it prevented the SNP being elected in their seat – something that would be unheard of in basically any other seat, in a hangover from the Scottish Referendum. That said, they are still expected to gain a large number of seats in Scotland, and thus put themselves in a position of power at Westminster.
3. Finally, there’s the UKIP factor. As the graphs below show, UKIP are one of the most talked-about parties of the campaign, well ahead of their expected representation in parliament (although, we should acknowledge, the UK has a first-past-the-post system, and UKIP’s representation would likely be higher in a proportional system). Paddy Power suggest that they will receive fewer than 3.5 seats (8/11), compared to 43.5 for SNP, yet the two seem to be roughly equivalent in terms of discussion on Twitter. Of course, pure volume of conversation doesn’t tell the full story, and much of the conversation around UKIP may be negative in nature – yet, our overall sentiment gauge shows little difference between UKIP and the other political parties in that regard. So, this will be interesting to watch — will interest in UKIP die down as their political prospects recede, or will we see a surprise on election day?

Aside from these, our live graphs of Twitter activity around the election tell a story of their own and are designed to be explored on a daily or even hourly basis as the social media conversation shifts in volume, tone and topic during the campaign. Previously, we have seen that major shifts in conversation do not just make for interesting journalism, but can also be cause of speculation about how the election might actually play out. We are expecting to see a more exciting representation of the conversation during this election, compared to our previous work in Queensland and new South Wales, due to the higher volume of election-related social media conversations across the UK.

The most notable change compared to our previous election coverage is the addition of the pie charts, which we think provide a much clearer visualisation of the share of conversation, and clearly compare the whole-of-campaign trends with developments over the past 24 hours. Also included are sentiment breakdowns per party, alongside currently trending hashtags, and an analysis of the total conversation volume over time.

Overall Conversation Share

Sentiment

Volume of Conversation

We plan to release some further graphs as the 7 May election date approaches – including a look at particular battleground seats, and a breakdown of the “positive” conversation around parties.

Hypometer is also undergoing some significant development in the lead-up to our first launch product – also to be released in May. You can follow the progress on the Hypometer project blog.

Position Purpose

This appointment supports an ARC Future Fellowship research project investigating intermedia information flows in the Australian online public sphere. The emergence of new media forms has led to a profound transformation of the Australian media environment: mainstream, niche, and social media intersect in many ways, online and offline. Increased access to large-scale data on public communication online enables an observation of how the nation responds to the news of the day, how themes and topics unfold, and how interest publics develop and decline over time. This project uses such observations to trace how information flows across media spaces, and to develop a new model of the online public sphere. It makes significant contributions to innovation in research methods in the digital humanities, and provides an important basis for policies aimed at closing digital and social divides. Research on the project commenced in April 2014.

The Postdoctoral Research Fellow will contribute to project management and undertake specific research tasks and will also be involved in the supervision of one of the PhD students associated with the project. The position will be based at QUT in Brisbane, and will support the timely analysis of public communication activities which relate to current debates. The presence of this full-time staff member will ensure the project’s agility in responding to unfolding events, and substantially enhance its ability to engage in and impact on public debate over the lifetime of the Future Fellowship.

Selection Criteria

Essential:

1. Completion or partial completion of a postgraduate degree in Media and Communication or a closely related area, and relevant work experience as a researcher;
2. Demonstrated expertise in research on the contemporary public sphere and on information flows in online and social media, with substantial research outputs in quality conferences, journals, and edited books;
3. Demonstrated expert knowledge of, and experience with, qualitative and quantitative research which utilises innovative methods drawing on ‘big social data’ from social media and other relevant online sources;
4. Demonstrated advanced expertise in the use of network mapping and analytics techniques for the study of user interaction and information dissemination across social media and related networks;
5. Effective written, interpersonal and computer-mediated communication skills and experience in using project management tools;
6. Demonstrated relevant project coordination experience, and ability to work in a team and autonomously;
7. Demonstrated computing skills, including familiarity with digital research management and social media research tools.

Desirable:

1. Have prior university-based work experience;
2. Have an understanding of the strategic research agenda of the QUT Social Media Research Group and other relevant QUT research initiatives.

Specific Duties

The appointee will carry out a range of tasks associated with project activities, including:

• Use data collection and analysis methods and instruments developed for the project for a variety of purposes, including:
  • Post hoc research into user activity patterns and information flows in the Australian online public sphere across a wide range of cases;
  • Speedy and agile analysis of online activities in issue publics related to current events, and publication of initial analysis in relevant online fora;
  • Input into further development of online media tracking and analysis methods and instruments developed by the project.
• Contribute to the development of new models of communication processes in the Australian online public sphere, by:
  • Tracing the trajectories of intermedia information flows across the diverse datasets available to the project;
  • Developing and testing a range of preliminary models for the conceptualisation of issue publics and other formations of public discourse in online environments;
  • Contributing to the integration of these models into a more comprehensive framework for understanding processes of communication across the contemporary media ecology.
• Contribute to the dissemination of research findings from the project by:
  • Publishing preliminary analyses and findings in relevant outlets (The Conversation, project Website and other publications, etc.);
  • Presenting project findings at relevant national and international conferences in media and communication and related fields;
  • Publishing research outcomes from the project in sole- and collaboratively authored articles and chapters in high-profile journals and books.
• Participate in project management by:
  • Communicating with the research team, partner organisations and networks, and the wider public, in meetings, online, at events and in publications;
  • Maintaining and using communication and collaborative research tools for project management and coordination purposes;
  • contributing to the supervision of one of the PhD researchers associated with the project.

Background

This project is an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship project which draws on several ‘big data’ sources on Australian public communication. This appointment provides an unprecedented opportunity to investigate the flow of information across the Australian online public sphere at large scale and in close to real time, within a world-class research environment. With an ERA ranking of 5 (“well above world standing”), Creative Industries at QUT is the lead site for Media and Communication research in Australia, and ARC Future Fellow Professor Axel Bruns is an international research leader in the area of Internet studies.