Readers of Gatewatching may be interested in this: the call for papers for EDEM 2010, the fourth international conference on e-democracy, to be held in Austria next May, has now been released. I attended EDEM 2009 in Vienna a couple of months ago, and thoroughly enjoyed it; much of the work presented there (including the paper which Jason and I co-authored, of course) was directly relevant also to the Australian context, especially in light of the explorations currently being undertaken by the Government 2.0 Task Force.

From the CFP for EDEM 2010:

EDem10

4th International Conference on eDemocracy 2010

Read more…

government, policy, politics, public sphere CFP, conference, democracy, e-democracy, government, participation, research, social media

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.

blogging academia, blogging, Home Cooked Theory, research, UQ

I got somethin’ in New Matilda today reporting on my recent travels to conferences at home and abroad. There’s a cross-post over the fold, but you should go there instead and read the other stuff on the site while you’re at it.

Read more…

UK, public sphere academic, conferences, e-democracy, journalism, Margaret Simons, MEAA, newspapers, public sphere, quality, research, Roy Greenslade, Steven Coleman, sustainability, UK

I thought I’d put up here my first piece that’s come out of digesting the youdecide2007 experience. This is the draft version of a paper I’ve submitted to an academic journal, though I think it’s accessible enough for anyone with an interest to read. 

It’s reflecting on the forms of cultural labour our small team did during the election in facilitating citizen journalism, which mixed more traditional tasks of journalism with new disciplines.

Downloadable below

Preditors - Making citizen journalism work (PDF)

As the paper makes clear, I’ve called the workers who  facilitate citizen journalism preditors - thinking through this new form of cultural labour will, I hope, help us get past some often silly oppositions that get set up between citizen journalism and “teh MSM”. Crowdsourced citizen journalism projects actually need “go-to” people with a certain minimum of journalism training; mainstream media organisations are increasingly looking to harness user-generated content. This has implications for journalism training, established media and independent journalism initiatives.

I’ve nominated four areas of responsibility for preditors: content work, networking, community work and tech work. You’ll see how they blend in the paper.

It’s pretty long - over 8000 words - but if you think it’s hard work reading that much, you should try writing it! My long-form writing muscles got a good work out. Fellow scholar-nerds might care to know that this length might be unacceptable for many Australian journals, but is pretty normal for international journals. I’ve handed this one in to one of them (it’s a secret while its in peer review).

I’m looking for reactions and comments, which you might like to put in the comments below… I will give out minties to anyone who finds typos! I’m giving a version of this paper at this conference on citizen journalism in Brisbane this week, and again in England in April!

citizen journalism academic, citizen journalism, elections, preditor, research, youdecide2007

Good news! Our University has purchased a site license for Leximancer, and we’ll be making extensive use of it in our research on the Australian blogosphere.

The blurb from the website gives a pretty neat summary of what Leximancer does:

Leximancer is a software tool that enables users to find meaning from text-based documents. It automatically identifies key themes, concepts and ideas from unstructured text with little or no guidance. The innovative concept map allows users to interact with the analysis – navigating the true meaning of the text.

Of course, there are other ways to find “meaning” in text, but the application for it in studying the blogosphere is in finding out whether particular bloggers have concepts or themes that they return to over time, and whether that’s matched by the comments threads.

I imagine bloggers themselves might be interested in seeing the results of this kind of analysis of their blogs - we might issue a call for dump files soon when we’re more expert users.

Leximancer itself is an interesting example of research commercialisation - it began its life over at UQ as applied IT research, and now its a commercial venture.

Anyway, its bound to be a fun toy to play with - the first thing we’ll do is analyse our own project, youdecide2007, to see which concepts and themes recur most frequently.

blogging blogging, Leximancer, research, youdecide2007