Axel Bruns: An introduction to practice mapping
Hosted by the Center for Digital Narrative, Prof. Axel Bruns leads a workshop introducing the analytical approach of practice mapping - the use of vector embeddings of networked actions and interactions to map commonalities and disjunctures in the practices of social media users.
Main content
This workshop introduces the analytical approach of practice mapping (Bruns et al., 2025), using vector embeddings of networked actions and interactions to map commonalities and disjunctures in the practices of social media users, as a framework for methodological advancement beyond the limitations of conventional network analysis and visualisation. In particular, this innovative methodological framework has the potential to incorporate multiple distinct modes of action and interaction into a single practice map, can be further enriched with account-level attributes such as information gleaned from textual analysis, profile information, available demographic details, and other features, and can be applied even to a cross-platform analysis of communicative patterns and practices. Using a sample dataset, this workshop introduces the basic steps in practice mapping and provides an outlook on how it may be applied in the study of complex communicative processes in social media.
- Bruns, A., Kasianenko, K., Suresh, V. P., Dehghan, E., & Vodden, L. (2025). Untangling the Furball: A Practice Mapping Approach to the Analysis of Multimodal Interactions in Social Networks. Social Media + Society, 11(2).
Prof. Axel Bruns is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society. His books include Are Filter Bubbles Real? (2019) and Gatewatching and News Curation: Journalism, Social Media, and the Public Sphere (2018), and the edited collections Digitizing Democracy (2019), the Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics (2016), and Twitter and Society (2014). His current work focusses on the study of user participation in social media spaces, and its implications for our understanding of the contemporary public sphere, drawing especially on innovative new methods for analysing 'big social data'. He served as President of the Association of Internet Researchers in 2017–19. His research blog is at http://snurb.info/, and he tweets at @snurb_dot_info.