new articles: Twitter and television; Australian political blogs

The first half of 2012 has rather flown by; I’ve spent much of the year so far teaching with Open Universities Australia, as well as continuing my work as a Research Fellow for the CCI’s ‘Media Ecologies and Methodological Innovation‘ project (see Mapping Online Publics). Over the upcoming months, I’m taking a break from teaching to work on a number of research projects, in the immediate future taking me to Germany next month for workshops and then, in October, to the UK and Turkey to present at IR13 and ECREA. There is a lot of work to be done for those papers (and indeed there are several papers to write!), with more information and work-in-progress to follow.

In the past week, a couple of articles that I contributed to have been made available, which collectively present some of the new research I’m working on and also more familiar material drawing from my thesis. The first is ‘More than a backchannel: Twitter and television’, a brief essay by Stephen Harrington, Axel Bruns, and myself, written for a collection of pieces on Audience Interactivity and Participation edited by José Manuel Noguera. The essay, as the name suggests, outlines ways that television and Twitter are interlinked and interact, which will be examined further in some of our forthcoming conference papers. It, and all of the other contributions to this volume, can be found in this PDF.

The second article is a more historical overview of political blogging in Australia: ‘Confrontation and cooptation: A brief history of Australian political blogs’, co-authored with Axel Bruns for the special issue of Media International Australia on ‘Internet Histories’ edited by Jock Given and Gerard Goggin. As a much shorter piece than my thesis, there is obviously not the same scope to explore every aspect of Australian political blogging or the different bloggers involved (and trying to do so is not the aim of the article); instead, the article highlights several key themes and events within the ongoing development of political blogging. The abstract can be found on the MIA website, with the article available through Informit for subscribers.