Vernacular Creativity, Cultural Participation and New Media Literacy: Photography and the Flickr Network

Livingstone (2004) proposes that most discussions of new media literacy are characterised by historically unresolved tensions between 'critical' or 'enlightenment' views of literacy - polarised philosophical positions that see literacy as a normative and exclusionary construction on the one hand (the 'critical' view); or as an aid to progress and equality that we should aim to extend to all people on the other (the 'enlightenment' view). In this paper, I begin from a position that critically evaluates and balances these two available approaches. Drawing on cultural and media studies perspectives and methodological concerns, the paper historicises and analyses the emerging patterns of cultural competencies and cultural value that work to construct new media literacy for cultural participation in the Flickr photosharing network

#ausvotes: How Twitter covered the 2010 Australian federal election

While the 2007 Australian federal election was notable for the use of social media by the Australian Labor Party in campaigning, the 2010 election took place in a media landscape in which social media–especially Twitter–had become much more embedded in both political journalism and independent political commentary. This article draws on the computer-aided analysis of election-related Twitter messages, collected under the #ausvotes hashtag, to describe the key patterns of activity and thematic foci of the election’s coverage in this particular social media site. It introduces novel metrics for analysing public communication via Twitter, and describes the related methods. What emerges from this analysis is the role of the #ausvotes hashtag as a means of gathering an ad hoc ‘issue public’– a finding which is likely to be replicated for other hashtag communities

Doing blog research: the computational turn

Blogs and other online platforms for personal writing such as LiveJournal have been of interest to researchers across the social sciences and humanities for a decade now. Although growth in the uptake of blogging has stalled somewhat since the heyday of blogs in the early 2000s, blogging continues to be a major genre of Internet-based communication. Indeed, at the same time that mass participation has moved on to Facebook, Twitter, and other more recent communication phenomena, what has been left behind by the wave of mass adoption is a slightly smaller but all the more solidly established blogosphere of engaged and committed participants. Blogs are now an accepted part of institutional, group, and personal communications strategies (Bruns and Jacobs, 2006); in style and substance, they are situated between the more static information provided by conventional Websites and Webpages and the continuous newsfeeds provided through Facebook and Twitter updates. Blogs provide a vehicle for authors (and their commenters) to think through given topics in the space of a few hundred to a few thousand words – expanding, perhaps, on shorter tweets, and possibly leading to the publication of more fully formed texts elsewhere. Additionally, they are also a very flexible medium: they readily provide the functionality to include images, audio, video, and other additional materials – as well as the fundamental tool of blogging, the hyperlink itself. This chapter appeared in the Sage collection Research Methods & Methodologies in Education edited by James Arthur, Michael Waring, Robert Coe, and Larry V. Hedges. This version is a pre-print edition of the chapter

Digital Storytelling and History Lines: Community Engagement in a Master-Planned Development

The introduction of new media and information and communication technology enables a greater variety of formats and content beyond conventional texts in the application and discourse of public history projects. Multimedia and personalised content requires public historians and cultural community developers to grasp new skills and methods to make representations of and contributions to a collective community memory visible. This paper explores the challenge of broadening and reinvigorating the traditional role of the public historian working with communities via the facilitation, curation and mediation of digital content in order to foster creative expression in a residential urban development. It seeks to better understand the role of locally produced and locally relevant content, such as personal and community images and narratives, in the establishment of meaningful social networks of urban residents. The paper discusses the use of digital storytelling and outlines the development of a new community engagement application we call History Lines

Sharing news, making sense, saying thanks: patterns of talk on Twitter during the Queensland floods

Abstract: This paper examines the discursive aspects of Twitter communication during the floods in the summer of 2010–2011 in Queensland, Australia. Using a representative sample of communication associated with the #qldfloods hashtag on Twitter, we coded and analysed the patterns of communication. We focus on key phenomena in the use of social media in crisis communication: communal sense-making practices, the negotiation of participant roles, and digital convergence around shared events. Social media is used both as a crisis communication and emergency management tool, as well as a space for participants to engage in emotional exchanges and communication of distress.Authored by Frances Shaw, Jean Burgess, Kate Crawford and Axel Bruns

Co-creative media: theorising digital storytelling as a platform for researching and developing participatory culture

This paper considers the question, 'what is co-creative media, and why is it a useful idea in social media research'? The term 'co-creative media' is now used by Creative Industries researchers at QUT to theoretically frame their use of digital storytelling as an action research platform for investigating participatory new media culture. Digital storytelling is a set of collaborative digital media production techniques that have been used to facilitate social participation in numerous Australian and international contexts. Digital storytelling has been adapted by Creative Industries researchers at QUT as a platform for researching the potential of vernacular creativity in a variety of contexts, including social inclusion of marginalized and disadvantaged groups; inclusion in public histories of narratives that might be overlooked; and articulation of voices that otherwise remain silent in the formulation of social and economic development strategies. The adaption of digital storytelling to different contexts has been shaped by the reflexive, recursive, and pragmatic requirements of action research. Amongst other things, this activity draws attention to the agency of researchers in facilitating these kinds of participatory media processes and outcomes. This discussion serves to problematise concepts of participatory media by introducing the term 'co-creative media' and differentiating these from other social media production practices

Preheating after Small-Field Inflation

Whereas preheating after chaotic and hybrid inflation models has been abundantly studied in the literature, preheating in small field inflation models, where the curvature of the inflaton potential is negative during inflation, remains less explored. In these models, a tachyonic instability at the end of inflation leads to a succession of exponentially large increases and \emph{decreases} of the inflaton fluctuations as the inflaton condensate oscillates around the minimum of its potential. The net effect is a competition between low-momentum modes which grow and decrease significantly, and modes with higher momenta which grow less but also decrease less. We develop an analytical description of this process, which is analogous to the quantum mechanical problem of tunneling through a volcano-shaped potential. Depending on the parameters, preheating may be so efficient that it completes in less than one oscillation of the inflaton condensate. Preheating after small field inflation may also be followed by a long matter-dominated stage before the universe thermalizes, depending on the energy scale of inflation and the details of the inflaton interactions. Finally, another feature of these models is that the spectrum of the inflaton fluctuations at the end of preheating may be peaked around the Hubble scale. In fact, because preheating starts when the second slow-roll parameter $|\eta|$ becomes of order unity while the first slow-roll parameter $\epsilon$ is still much smaller than one, the universe is still inflating during preheating and the modes amplified by the initial tachyonic instability leave the Hubble radius. This may lead to an abundant production of primordial black holes and gravitational waves with frequencies today which are naturally small enough to fall into the range accessible by high-sensitivity interferometric experiments.Comment: 34 pages, 16 figures. v2: 1 ref. added, accepted for publication in Phys.Rev.

A 'big data' approach to mapping the Australian twittersphere

This chapter discusses the methodological aspects and empirical findings of a large-scale, funded project investigating public communication through social media in Australia. The project concentrates on Twitter, but we approach it as representative of broader current trends toward the integration of large datasets and computational methods into media and communication studies in general, and social media scholarship in particular. The research discussed in this chapter aims to empirically describe networks of affiliation and interest in the Australian Twittersphere, while reflecting on the methodological implications and imperatives of ‘big data’ in the humanities. Using custom network crawling technology, we have conducted a snowball crawl of Twitter accounts operated by Australian users to identify more than one million users and their follower/followee relationships, and have mapped their interconnections. In itself, the map provides an overview of the major clusters of densely interlinked users, largely centred on shared topics of interest (from politics through arts to sport) and/or sociodemographic factors (geographic origins, age groups). Our map of the Twittersphere is the first of its kind for the Australian part of the global Twitter network, and also provides a first independent and scholarly estimation of the size of the total Australian Twitter population. In combination with our investigation of participation patterns in specific thematic hashtags, the map also enables us to examine which areas of the underlying follower/followee network are activated in the discussion of specific current topics – allowing new insights into the extent to which particular topics and issues are of interest to specialised niches or to the Australian public more broadly. Specifically, we examine the Twittersphere footprint of dedicated political discussion, under the #auspol hashtag, and compare it with the heightened, broader interest in Australian politics during election campaigns, using #ausvotes; we explore the different patterns of Twitter activity across the map for major television events (the popular competitive cooking show #masterchef, the British #royalwedding, and the annual #stateoforigin Rugby League sporting contest); and we investigate the circulation of links to the articles published by a number of major Australian news organisations across the network. Such analysis, which combines the ‘big data’-informed map and a close reading of individual communicative phenomena, makes it possible to trace the dynamic formation and dissolution of issue publics against the backdrop of longer-term network connections, and the circulation of information across these follower/followee links. Such research sheds light on the communicative dynamics of Twitter as a space for mediated social interaction. Our work demonstrates the possibilities inherent in the current ‘computational turn’ (Berry, 2010) in the digital humanities, as well as adding to the development and critical examination of methodologies for dealing with ‘big data’ (boyd and Crawford, 2011). Out tools and methods for doing Twitter research, released under Creative Commons licences through our project Website, provide the basis for replicable and verifiable digital humanities research on the processes of public communication which take place through this important new social network

Fake news identification on Twitter with hybrid CNN and RNN models

The problem associated with the propagation of fake news continues to grow at an alarming scale. This trend has generated much interest from politics to academia and industry alike. We propose a framework that detects and classifies fake news messages from Twitter posts using hybrid of convolutional neural networks and long-short term recurrent neural network models. The proposed work using this deep learning approach achieves 82% accuracy. Our approach intuitively identifies relevant features associated with fake news stories without previous knowledge of the domain