Introduction : the importance of method in the study of the ‘Political Internet’

In this introduction, we outline our understanding of the ‘political Internet’ and present the methodologically focused approach that we take to the topic in this volume. We then discuss the growing social and political relevance of the Internet and examine the characteristics of the contemporary ‘Web 2.0’ Internet, before outlining the general methodological challenges and opportunities that it presents for researchers. We argue that three key characteristics of online political information in the Web 2.0 era shape and constrain any study of the political Internet. These characteristics are (1) extremely large volume, (2) heterogeneity and (3) plasticity. We contend that this combination creates what we term a ‘dynamic data deluge’ for social scientists, which makes distinguishing and recording meaningful information generated by the political Internet a methodologically challenging endeavour. We then discuss how the chapters collected here attempt to make sense of the dynamic data deluge that the political Internet presents. In the course of doing so, we build a picture of what distinguishes social media from earlier types of digital communication and discuss how social media content can be assimilated and processed by social science. We touch on epistemological concerns arising from this discussion before outlining the structure of the book and providing details of the individual contributions

Population genetic structuring in a rare tropical plant:\ud Idiospermum australiense (Diels) S.T. Blake

Idiospermum australiense (Diels) S.T. Blake is considered to be one of the few remaining species of an ancient assemblage to have survived the attrition ofAustralian tropical rain forest during historically drier periods. This monotypic species is currently restricted to two very wet lowland rain forest locations in Australia’s wet tropical World Heritage Area that are thought to have provided refuge for humid-adapted taxa during the last glacial maximum. Two dominant (RAPD and ISSR) molecular marker sets were employed to investigate whether the genetic structure of Idiospermum could be attributed to its restriction to these quite disjunct localities. The results reveal that neither its restriction to purported\ud Pleistocene refugia nor the geographic distance between\ud populations could fully explain the distribution of variation in the Idiospermum data set, with evidence to suggest that potentially deeper time events have played a role in population structuring and the distribution of diversity. Although there is sufficient evidence in the data to suggest that gene dispersal is quite limited in the species, further investigation is still needed to yield more informative detail on additional factors, such as breeding and germination strategies and their potential influence over population structuring and diversity levels within each population and refugium