Hosted by the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), the 2016 event will focus on digital methods for sociocultural research. It is designed for university researchers at all stages of their careers, from doctoral students, postdoctoral and mid-career academics to established scholars.

The week-long intensive program will focus on new quantitative, qualitative and data-driven digital methods and their research applications in the humanities and social sciences, with a particular focus on media, communication and cultural studies and their applications in the creative industries.

Participants will work with leading researchers, engage in hands-on workshop activities and will have the opportunity to present and get feedback on their own work.

The Summer School will offer a range of introductory hands-on workshops in topics such as:

• Digital ethnography
• Issue mapping
• Social media data analytics
• Software and mobile app studies
• Analysing visual social media
• Geo-spatial mapping
• Data visualisation
• Agent-based modelling
• Web scraping

The program will be conceptually grounded in the problems of public communication and privacy, digital media production and consumption, and the ethical issues associated with big data and digital methods in the context of digital media environments. There will be talks on these topics in addition to the workshops.

The first announcement of speakers and facilitators includes Associate Professor Kath Albury (University of New South Wales), Professor Axel Bruns (QUT Digital Media Research Centre), Professor Jean Burgess (QUT Digital Media Research Centre), Distinguished Professor Stuart Cunningham (QUT Digital Media Research Centre), Professor Terry Flew (QUT Digital Media Research Centre), Associate Professor Folker Hanusch (QUT Digital Media Research Centre), Professor Eszter Hargittai (Northwestern University), Dr Tim Highfield (QUT Digital Media Research Centre), Professor Larissa Hjorth (RMIT University), Dr Tama Leaver (Curtin University), Professor Ben Light (QUT Digital Media Research Centre), Professor Brian McNair (QUT Digital Media Research Centre), Dr Peta Mitchell (QUT Digital Media Research Centre), Professor Julian Thomas (Swinburne Institute for Social Research) and Associate Professor Patrik Wikström (QUT Digital Media Research Centre).

Please visit the #cciss16 Website for further information and application details.

Difficult as it may be to believe, we’re still almost three months out from the likely date of the next Australian federal election; campaigning during this time will become even more frenzied than it has been to date. A sea of speculation, controversy, and crisis surrounds the polls, and an increasing subset of the political battle is being fought online, through party Websites and social media. This is beginning to affect the balance of power in the overall media ecology: while mainstream media have historically played an important role in political campaigning and in shaping public opinions, online and social media now contribute new communicative ingredients to the public sphere.

While much attention has already been paid to the way that social media users critique and criticise the mainstream media, the opposite is less true. Conventional print and broadcast media have been instrumental in raising awareness about the political uses of social media platforms, and in doing so reflect contemporary views; so, what is the portrayal of social media in the media?

This question lies at the core of Social Media in the Media, a new report released by the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCI) in collaboration with the University of Oslo. In the report, we investigate how the political uses of social media are portrayed in the Australian mainstream media, in order to understand the perceptions that help shape how politicians, citizens and journalists employ new media tools to support their political objectives. Through a longitudinal comparative analysis we identify significant changes in how social media have been reported on since 2008. Overall, we are able to trace the gradual adoption and acceptance of social media as political tools, by politicians themselves as well as by journalists and everyday citizens.

Users

For the study, we sampled Australian mainstream media articles about social media in politics from the years 2008, 2010, and 2012. Over this time, politicians’ uses of social media were covered most prominently in the mainstream media; citizen uses came a close second overall. Journalists’ uses of social media in political reporting were considered far less often, even in spite of the considerable changes to journalistic practice that have occurred with the advent of real-time social media such as Twitter.

Politicians

Commentary on politicians’ uses of social media changed considerably from 2008 to 2012. Early articles commonly reported on politicians’ “incorrect” or “inefficient” use of social media, and suggested that they were mainly using these tools in order to demonstrate their ability to move with the times. But by 2010, and certainly by 2012, social media use was described as more integrated into the day-to-day practices of politicians. Social media had become normalised: they were no longer new. Similarly, articles that discussed the attitudes of politicians towards social media portrayed more negative attitudes in 2008 (viewing social media are “useless”, or even as detrimental to political debate). Considerably more positive perceptions emerged in 2010 and 2012. This suggests that politicians (and the journalists covering them) were beginning to see the benefits in using social media as political tools.

Citizens

Members of the public were predominantly portrayed as using social media to campaign, fight for their rights, and support particular causes. News articles construct social media use by citizens as a means of demanding and achieving change and improvement in the public policy issues that affect them. Articles also suggested that citizens use social media to an important extent to support, criticise or gossip about politicians. Interestingly, such uses increased substantially in 2012; this may reflect a broader change in Australian political discourse (towards more emotive and inflammatory language, and strong public responses to it), with prominent pro- and anti-Gillard/Abbott groups emerging on social media platforms. It remains to be seen whether this remains an isolated episode, or whether it indicates a lasting shift in the reported political uses of social media.

Journalists

By contrast, the use of social media by journalists was much less reported on than uses by politicians and members of the public. We noted an overall increase in articles covering the use of social media by journalists; we also identified a shift across the years in how social media are portrayed as tools for political journalism: in 2008, articles demonstrated the potential of social media as tools for political news reporting, yet indicated that this potential was not being realised. By 2010, articles suggested that journalists had begun to use social media, if not yet in the most effective ways. Articles from 2012, finally, conveyed more successful engagement by journalists with social media; journalists also increasingly used social media as sources or supporting evidence in their reporting, for example by citing politicians’ social media statements and conversations. On average, some 26 percent of the articles we examined across 2008, 2010 and 2012 cited politicians’ statements on Twitter, Facebook or other social media platforms.

Social and Traditional Media: Connections, Comparisons, Contrasts

New, social media have traditionally been perceived as a threat to the established news industry; in Australia, this manifested especially in the ‘blog wars’ of the mid to late 2000s. However, our study reveals a significant decrease in the number of articles that focus on a comparison of social and traditional media from 2008 to 2012. Instead, journalistic coverage of social media in politics has shifted to a portrayal of social and traditional media as sitting comfortably alongside one another. By 2008, a perception of social media as useful additional media had already become dominant, in fact; in subsequent years, coverage focussed increasingly on the growing integration of social media into political practice, engagement, and reporting. Combined with the overall decrease in articles that compared social and traditional media, this shows that social media in politics have become normalised – the debate is no longer over whether, but how they may be used.

The role of the media in setting political agendas and impacting on public opinion has long been noted. As social media become increasingly integrated into the modern political landscape, then, we need to consider the contribution they make to setting political agendas. Analysing their portrayal as political tools by traditional media can provide important insights into the emergence of what Yochai Benkler has termed ‘hybrid media ecologies’. In light of the coming federal election we plan to continue our examination of how social media are conceptualised and used by politicians, citizens and journalists, comparing especially the election years 2010 and 2013.

Already, our study shows a political media ecology in considerable flux, and points to significant changes to the professional practices of politicians, journalists, and other stakeholders in the political process in Australia. As politicians, citizens and journalists come to terms with using social media, we need to turn our focus to the impact of these tools, and to develop new methods for analysing and understanding them.

This report is part of a joint research project on The Impact of Social Media on Agenda-Setting in Election Campaigns with scholars from the University of Oslo, the University of Bergen, Uppsala University, and California State University. It investigates the interaction and inter-media agenda-setting between social media and mainstream media in different cultural and political settings, in order to develop cross-national comparisons. (Cover image by whatleydude on Flickr.)

Big data is big news in almost every sector including crisis communication. However, apart from having limited access to big data, we often do not have necessary tools to analyze and cross reference large data sets for verification and validity in order to use it for Crisis Communication. Thus we are often left with smaller dataset that we can gather from various sources. This, apparently is not a huge limitation as it appears that in crisis situations the important data can still be found from datasets that we can gather using currently available tools.

When we analyzed 164390 tweets collected during 2011 Christchurch earthquake using yourTwapperKeeper to find out what type of location specific information people mentioned in their tweet and when do they talk about that, we found that the key areas can still be identified from the small datasets. In the following section I will break it down in smaller segments.

Finding key areas

When we searched for location (or named entity) mentions every half an hour we find the pattern that the larger or known areas were mentioned lot more than the lesser known areas. In the following image we can see that people talked about the larger area first as they were just getting to know about the crisis and they may or may not be familiar with smaller area such as Lyttelton.

Using key areas to narrow down specific area

Nonetheless, finding the large area is useful for primary identification. By locating the bigger area, one can identify that the specific mentioned area that may share common name with another place falls into the disaster area and not in another city or country. For example, the keyword, Cathedral was mentioned 801 times in the first 6 hours. Although New Zealand has several other places with the same “Cathedral” name such as Cathedral Place in Auckland, Cathedral Court in Hahei, Cathedral Cove in Waikato, the mention of the Cathedral was for Cathedral Square in Christchurch. Therefore by using the frequent mentioned area as a filter we can pinpoint conversations related to smaller areas in-side the crisis area.

Narrowing to important locations

Once we have identified the area, it is time to look for mention of other small areas since in order for the data to be useful for disaster recovery, we may need to look for smaller location entries such as a certain road, hospital, airport etc. We can see that the Cathedral was mentioned the most at the beginning and it was one of the first places that was affected. The word hospital was mentioned heavily between 2 to 2.5 hours. There may be two reasons for such mentions. One is, people are looking for hospital to go to or suggestions that certain hospital is open or closed or is over capacity. Another is, a hospital is also hit at that hour. For the case of this earthquake, Christchurch hospital was getting partly evacuated at that hour due to damage in some areas.

We also see mention of airport in various tweets at different time. By reading the tweets we can find that most of the mentions were either because people were getting unconfirmed news that the airport is hit as well and later they found that airport was not damaged and can be used.

Narrowing to exact places

If we now eliminate the top two mentioned areas among the specific areas, we find that CTV or Canterbury Television Building was mentioned heavily after 18 hours of the earthquake. It also had around 200 mentioned in the first 6 hours. Since 94 of 168 causalities recorded in Christchurch earthquake was from this building let us focus on this a little more. From the collected tweets we can see that first half hour there is only one mention about the building. The number of mentioned did not increase to a noticeable amount for next 2 hours. However starting from third hour more and more information about CTV build-ing starts to appear in tweet stream.

Based on the limited data collected, we can see that it is possible to identify at least bigger areas really quickly as they gets mentioned very frequently. For example, the Cathedral is at the heart of Christchurch and therefore it was extremely well known for people in that area and was heavily mentioned. Furthermore, early footages (images and videos) also contained clips of destroyed Cathedral, which was then retweeted many times.

However, the more specific or smaller areas are mentioned less frequently. Although if one observes the repeated mention of a certain location or specific areas, one can find that that is a potentially dis-aster stricken area – which was the case for CTV building.

Discussion

Based on the analysis, we can suggest that in the absence of access to large data sets, if we are only looking for location information to find out which area re-quires more help, we can still find out names of the places that were hard hit during disaster. Although the small dataset we have at CCI were set up after the hashtag became popular, and therefore missed certain amount of information, it is still appears to be quite useful for location identification from tweets gathered using existing method.

Further research is needed in this area to identify if there are other keywords that indicates location information such as use of “at” or “in” or other preposition as location names will not be available while the disaster is in progress. By using various other combinations it is potentially possible to find the mention of a location even if it is not reported in other medium.

Note: A version of this article was first published in International Conference on  e-Education, e-Business and Information Management (ICEEIM 2013) Beijing, China, March 14-15, 2013.  

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: CCI Winter School 2013

https://www.cciwinterschool.org

DEADLINE: 18 January 2013

Building on the widely-acknowledged success of last year’s inaugural CCI Winter School, we now invite applications for 2013. The CCI Winter School is a competitive program that offers selected doctoral students a week-long program of interdisciplinary study, collaboration and social interaction in the broad area of creative industries and innovation research, drawing on the Centre’s expertise in media, cultural and communication studies, economics, education, policy and law, in relation to the creative economy.

We welcome applications from emerging scholars working on related topics including, but not limited to:

* Cultural, media and creative industries policy

* Digital methods

* Community arts and media

* New business models in the creative economy

* Innovation studies

* Economics of the creative industries

* Game studies

* The creative industries in Asia

* Internet culture

* Social media

* Copyright and intellectual property

* The challenges of ‘big data’

* Creative careers and creative labour

Participants will work with leading researchers, engage in intensive workshop activities and receive direct feedback and individual mentoring on their own work. Social activities will provide additional opportunities for participants to get to know each other and form collaborative relationships that will last for years to come.

24 – 28 June 2013

APPLY at https://www.cciwinterschool.org

TWITTER: https://twitter.com/_CCI

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/pages/ARC-Centre-of-Excellence-for-Creative-Industries-and-Innovation/170588955734