Time for another quick news roundup. Following on from the ANZDMC 2012 conference in Brisbane, where Jean Burgess and I presented our research into the use of Twitter during the 2010/11 Christchurch earthquakes, there were another few follow-up presentations of our research on social media and crisis communication.

First, 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 conference. I’ve now published my two presentations from the workshop (slides + audio); they’re both online here.

Brisbane.
I’m still blogging somewhat selectively from the Australia New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management conference, given that some of the presentations here really are well outside my own research area. I’m here, though, because I’m presenting a paper with my QUT colleague Jean Burgess on our research into the use of Twitter following the 2010/11 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. The presentation is below (with audio to come soon, hopefully), and the full paper is also online.

This research is also associated with a new ARC Linkage-funded three-year research project on “Social Media in Times of Crisis” which we’re undertaking along with the Queensland Department for Community Safety and the Eidos Institute. There’s a PhD scholarship attached to this project, and we’re now looking for expressions of interest for this position, to commence shortly: students will be embedded with the DCS in Brisbane to develop, deploy, and evaluate enhanced strategies for the Department’s use of social media; they will also need to develop connections to other relevant emergency and media institutions. Students with strong connections to the local Brisbane and south-east Queensland community would be ideal. If you’re interested, please get in touch: a.bruns [at] qut.edu.au.

OK, so to save this blog from turning completely into a conference blog (watch out for the Australia/New Zealand Disaster and Emergency Management Conference, starting next week), here’s a round-up of my most recent publications. Most of these build on our Twitter research – and you can find more detailed updates about those projects over at Mapping Online Publics.

I’ve had three co-authored journal articles published over the past few weeks. Of these, the most recent one is in First Monday, and was co-authored with Eugene Liang Yuxiang from the National Cheng Chi University in Taipei, following on from a workshop on Twitter and crisis communication research which took place there last October. In the paper, Eugene and I compare our approaches to tracking disaster-related communication on Twitter – I discuss our work with yourTwapperkeeper and Eugene outlines the infrastructure the Taiwanese team have built. For more, see:

Axel Bruns and Eugene Liang Yuxian. “Tools and Methods for Capturing Twitter Data during Natural Disasters.” First Monday 17.4 (2012).

Two other publications are co-authored with my QUT colleague Jean Burgess, and appeared in Journalism Studies and Journalism Practice within two days of each other. The first of these is another methodology article, and outlines how our methods for Twitter research may be used by journalists and journalism researchers; it’s based on the paper we presented at the Future of Journalism conference in Cardiff in September 2011. More details are here:

Canberra.
And the (dubious) honour of presenting the final paper in the final session at DHA 2012 falls to … me. Below is the Powerpoint, and I’ll try to add audio to this as soon as I can, too I've now finally also managed to add the audio, no thanks to a very dysfunctional Slideshare.

Canberra.
The next speaker at DHA2012 is Sora Park, whose interest is in the processes of online discussion participation, initially especially in the context of the 100 days of political protest in South Korea in 2008. Different online discussion platforms have different affordances, of course – some will list only the most recent or most popular (or most recently popular) posts, for example, thus directing users’ attention towards specific contributions.

Canberra.
The first paper session at the Digital Humanities Australasia conference starts with a paper presented by Cynthia Witney, and deals with the differences between social networks and online communities. This is part of an ARC Linkage project which develops guidelines for an online community for breast cancer survivors, also sponsored by the Steel Blue boot company’s ‘purple boots’ philanthropic campaign.

Part of the aim here was also to move the campaign into a Web 2.0 space by developing a ‘purple boot brigade’ social network site; an early version of this network (based on Ning) attracted some 880 supporters. This early attempt at social networking successfully managed to spread awareness about the campaign and its cause; the site became a method for interactive social education.