gatewatching

I use a MacBook and everything, and I wouldn’t go back to PCs, but sometimes I find Apple-devotion a little creepy. Everyone knows they’re a multinational corporation that’s basically a lot like Bill’s mob, right? (Even though I use them, I always laugh at this Charlie Brooker takedown).

Anyway I laughed at GrodsCorp’s post today, which pricks the iPhone 2.0 hysteria a little bit by pointing out that while he was launching the machine, Steve Jobs’ pants were definitely Jeans 1.0

Apple, Grods

In a previous post, I mentioned our work in developing a new methodology for mapping link and concept networks in the Australian blogosphere. For a first test run of this project, we archived posts in some 300-400 Australian political blogs between the start of November 2007 (the last month of the federal election campaign) and the end of January 2008, and we’ve now begun an exploratory analysis of this corpus of data.

As noted in our discussion paper for this project, the first step in this analysis is to distinguish between different functional components of blogs and blog pages (something that does not necessarily happen in comparable studies, by the way). So, what I’m focussing on here are the blog posts themselves, which are of course the major discursive element of any blog - as part of our approach, we’ve separated these posts from all other content on the blog (headers, footers, blogrolls, sidebars, comments sections, etc.). While I’ll mainly discuss content analysis here, this is especially important also in the context of link analysis, of course, where blogroll, comment, and other links skew the data if we want to focus on examining the discursive network between blog posts.

So, building on this corpus of blog post data, here are some preliminary observations. What I’ve done here in the first place is to run the concept mapping software Leximancer over the content gathered from a selection of key Australian blogs, to both fine-tune that process and see if any discernible differences between individual blogs emerge. I’ll present the results in two ways: one simply lists the key terms for each blog in order of frequency (giving a quick indication of what they’re frequently talking about), and the second maps these key terms in relation to one another - terms which frequently co-occur in close proximity to one another in the text are located closer to one another than terms which don’t, in other words. (I’ll post these maps later, in the second part of this post.)

Read more…

academic, blogging

UPDATE: Download of today’s broadcast on citizen journalism available here. Well worth a listen.

Aussie readers should tune in at 6PM to ABC Radio National for Australia Talks this evening. It’s about citizen journalism.

Preview from the RN’s Australia Talks website:

abc, citizen journalism

Because we’re always keen to support other researchers, I’m re-posting this call out for research participants from an Honours student down the road at UQ. It looks like a research project on the relationship between bloggers and their readership - interesting stuff. Put the word out if possible.

Do you have a favourite blogger that you want to talk about?

I am an Honours student from the University of Queensland, Australia and I am conducting an email-based survey that looks at the experiences that blog readers have with their favourite bloggers.

To take part in this research you cannot be a blogger yourself and you cannot know the blogger offline.

For ethical and legal issues you MUST be 18+ years of age and an Australian Citizen to partake in this research.

If this sounds like you and you would like to participate in this original and exciting research project then please email Bo at:

s4029966[AT]student.uq.edu.au

Participation is until August 2008.

All inquiries are very much appreciated!

Via Home Cooked Theory.

Home Cooked Theory, UQ, academia, blogging, research

Thanks to a heads-up from Tim at Tree of Knowledge, I found out about this conference, the Personal democracy Forum, being held in New York City this month. Looks like they’ll be discussing some issues that have preoccupied us here at Gatewatching - the influence of new technologies on political campaigning and debate.

The debate in this area doesn’t just happen on Gatewatching The conference’s tagline is “technology is changing politics”, but Charlie Beckett (who heads up the LSE’s Polis Centre where Tim is studying) has posed the following tough questions that he’d like the conference to answer:

1. Tell me in concrete terms what the new technology has allowed you to do that is significantly different in political terms from before? Not just being faster, more connected, more responsive. Tell me what difference it has made, if any, in policy outcomes and the distribution of power?

2. Is this just an American thing? Is it because US politics was so sterile, so locked up by lobbyists and big money and ideological stasis? or can new technology unleash new democratic forces in other countries?

I’d add another - could you make a realistic comparison of the current impacts of online campaigning methods and traditional broadcast media? One of the big speakers at the conference, Clay Shirky, has said some pretty silly things lately about the place of television in our culture - I would hope that the conference would proceed with a recognition that broadcast media are still the principal information source for most voters. That’s not being cynical, just conceding that there is a long way to go, and lots of work to do, in making online engagement more generally available and effective.

Sadly I won’t be able to go - I’ll be preparing for something new (more on that later), but Tim says he’ll be liveblogging the conference (presumably over at TOK), so that’s something to look forward to.

Charlie Beckett, Clay Shirky, Tree of Knowledge, USA, conferences, democracy, e-democracy, elections

It’s probably going to be everywhere soon, but I just thought I’d link to what Daily Kos claims is the leaked text of Barry O’Bama’s victory speech claiming the Democratic Party’s nomination for the US Presidency. Whichever way you look at it, this is an historic moment.

Barack Obama, USA

Yesterday, Possum did a piece for Crikey (reproduced on his blog) which was a great take-down of some MSM reporting of some pretty inconsequential movements in the Newspoll numbers. Poss reckons the Oz (especially the Shanahany bits) is back to their old tricks - spinning, shifting the goalposts, and generally trying to make things look worse than they are for the PM.

If you’d rather rely on qualitative polling than the hunches of Dennis to get an insight into what people thought about the budget a little while back, check out Graham Young’s write-up of his What the People Want polling series in On Line Opinion this morning.

The summary? “Overall the budget didn’t evoke strong emotions and was incremental rather than revolutionary.” Kevin Rudd consolidated things, and although Graham’s survey didn’t include the fuelwatch fracas, it’s likely that the long-term effect of the last week or two will be closer to the findings of his polling than the guesses/spin on the meaning of quantitaive polling by gallery journos.

Dennis Shanahan, Graham Young, Possum Comitatus, The Australian, What the People Want, budget, poll wars, polling