Workshop: Digital Methods: Tools for Analysis

/

I can’t make it up to Manchester for this conference due to a clash with teaching, but Rob Procter and Rachel Gibson are presenting some preliminary findings from a pilot study of mining public opinion on Twitter, on which I’ve collaborated: “An Experiment in Opinion Mining Tweets” by Rob Procter, Manchester eResearch Centre, University of Manchester;

Read More

November 2: Speaking at Hansard Society/University of Manchester Debate on Social Media and Campaigning

/

This roundtable, organised as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science and taking place during Parliament Week (Oct 31 – Nov 6) brings together academics, politicians, activists, news producers and journalists to debate how social media are being used to promote protest and political change.

Read More

Brief Excerpt on WikiLeaks—From My New Book-in-Progress

/

I’m in the middle of writing a new book entitled The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power, to be published by Oxford University Press in New York and Oxford. I’ve just completed the rough first draft of the chapter that provides an extended case study and a particular interpretation of WikiLeaks.

Read More

Call: Journal of Communication Special Issue on Social Media and the “Arab Spring”

/

Phil Howard and Malcolm Parks are putting together a special issue of the Journal of Communication on communication technologies and political resistance in the Middle East and North Africa. The email from Malcolm Parks and the full call are below.

Read More

I’m presenting a paper at the UK Political Studies Association conference in London next week. If you’re at the conference, drop in. Full details on the PSA site.

/

I’ve been a member of the APSA Information Technology and Politics Section for longer than I care to remember. I’ve served on its executive committee and I’ve presented quite a few papers to its APSA panels. But over the last few years the section has become an even more interesting scholarly community than it was when I first joined.

Read More

My new journal article: “Explaining the Failure of an Online Citizen Engagement Initiative: The Role of Internal Institutional Variables”

/

This article presents an exploratory case study based on fieldwork consisting of in-depth, semistructured interviews and group discussions with administrative, legal, political, and technology staff involved in an online citizen engagement initiative in “TechCounty,” a pseudonymous U.S. local government authority operating in one of the most favorable sociodemographic and technological contexts imaginable.

Read More