Shifting Securities project data now available

Data from my colleague Ben O’Loughlin and colleagues’ ESRC-funded project, Shifting Securities: News Cultures Before and Beyond the 2003 Iraq War are now publicly available. This qualitative study includes approximately 145 interviews, focus groups and ethnographic reports with news publics in different UK cities, and 30 interviews and focus groups with military and government policymakers, BBC and Channel 4 newsmakers, and various security “elites”, from 2004-2007. To request access to the data, click here for the project page at the UK Data Archive (note: you need an account). This is rich data from an important period for security, legitimacy and multiculturalism in the UK.

Ben and Marie Gillespie welcome researchers making use of it. They also invite opportunities for comparative research (contact M.Gillespie@open.ac.uk or Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk).

[via the New Political Communication Unit blog.]

The Foreign Office’s Digital Diplomacy Initiative

Last week, the UK Foreign Office held a Digital Diplomacy event. Chaired by the BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones and promoted by Weber Shandwick, the event was designed as a showcase for the recent intensification of social media initiatives at the FCO. These come under the heading of “Bringing Foreign Policy Home.”

Cellan-Jones has a typically funny post about the event.

While it’s easy to be sceptical, it’s interesting to note that the FCO has not dumped its earlier internet enthusiasm overboard, as many predicted would happen when David Miliband and members of his team started blogging a couple of years ago.

The FCO bloggers are one of the several examples I discuss in my latest paper: Chadwick, A. (2009) “Web 2.0: New Challenges for the Study of E-Democracy in an Era of Informational Exuberance”I/S: Journal of Law and Policy for the Information Society 5 (1), pp. 9-41. Download pdf.