Tracking Social Media Participation: New Approaches to Studying User-Generated Content

The impact of user-generated content on a variety of media industries and practices - most obviously, journalism - is by now well understood from a conceptual perspective (e.g. Benkler 2006; Jenkins 2006; Bruns 2008). What remains less thoroughly explored is the possibility to utilise the affordances of Web 2.0 technologies themselves to generate large datasets that can be used to track and evaluate user participation practices in order to develop a solid evidence base for further research into social media, and further development of social media projects, technologies, and policies.

This presentation outlines research possibilities across a number of social media spaces, and uses the example of a current research project studying the Australian blogosphere to explore potential methodological approaches. What such research is able to address are questions about the structure of online networked publics: what permanent or temporary communities of bloggers exist online; what themes and topics do they discuss; how networked or fragmented are they; how do they interconnect with the mainstream (news) media; how does information travel and who sets the agenda?

Dr Axel Bruns is an Associate Professor in the Creative Industries Faculty at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (CCi), and a Senior Researcher in the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre. Bruns is the author of Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008) and Gatewatching: Collaborative Online News Production (2005), and the editor of Uses of Blogs with Joanne Jacobs (2006; all released by Peter Lang, New York). Bruns's research interests are in produsage (or collaborative user-led content development), blogging, citizen journalism, online publishing, virtual communities, creative industries, creative hypertext writing, and popular music studies. He has published a variety of articles in these fields, many of which can be found at snurb.info and Produsage.org. He also contributes to the Gatewatching.org group blog with Jason Wilson and Barry Saunders, and tweets as @snurb_dot_info.

The seminar is organized by the research group for media, ict and cultural policy.