The Norwegian version of mine and Mikael Hjerm’s methods book (original language is Swedish) is out now. I wrote roughly half of the book focusing on the chapters about qualitative coding and analysis as well as academic writing. The Norwegian version can be ordered from here, and the Swedish one from here.
My video essay “Geek Revenue: The Cultural Industries in the Age of Digital Piracy” is now published in issue #3 of Audiovisual Thinking. It features the theories of Georg Simmel, Dick Hebdige and others, plus interviews with representatives of Spotify, Sony and Xbox and with fan scholar Nancy Baym.
The aim of the video was to use classical cultural theory as well as current internet research to address the relationship between the cultural industries and the increasingly active and tech savvy audiences of the 21st century. Is there always a clear-cut division between capitalist media institutions on the one side, and a pirating audience on the other? What space is there for remix culture and other potentially copyright infringing activities in the discourse of digital content monetization?
Our paper for TA3 in London in a couple of weeks has taken bit of a different direction than what was stated in the original abstract due to the limitations imposed by TwapperKeeper last spring. Instead of analysing activist tweets, which actually (I realised) would have been hard due to my lacking knowledge of the languages in which much of the most interesting stuff was posted, we will look at news and blog discourse. I started this week with preliminary analyses based on some 20,000 newspaper articles on the Arab Spring collected via Retriever. The sample includes the five major Swedish papers and ranges from December 2010 to June of 2011.
Using Textometrica and Gephi, I was able to get a first overview of the news discourse on the events in North Africa and the Middle East during the first half of this year. The above graph roughly illustrates that five different thematic clusters can be identified. These revolve around governments and leaders (top left), geographic locations (top right), politics and protest (centre), physical manifestations (bottom right), and social media (bottom left). As the focus of the continued analysis will be on notions of new types of audience behaviours, I then chose to look closer at the conceptual relations within the bottom left cluster.
Employing one of the clustering algorithms in Gephi, I ended up with the above colour coded tag cloud. Concepts of the same colour are more closely related (co-occurring more often) in the 20,000 newspaper articles. This has been looking at how the Arab Spring has been discursively constructed by the news media. The next step will be to look at actual activist practices through digital media, by analysing blogs.
In an attempt to post more frequently here, I have started using BlogJet. It is a client for WordPress et al that will hopefully serve the function of lowering the threshold to writing and posting. It also links to flickr and YouTube in a convenient way. First day back at the office for me today. Looking forward to TA3 in London at the end of this month and will now start working on the paper to be presented there. A bit worried though, that the analyses I outlined in the abstract (below) will be hard to carry out since TwapperKeeper disabled the option of downloading and exporting archives.
Twitter Revolutions and Digital Uprisings
Mapping the protocols of emerging cultures of resistance on Twitter
This paper uses Twitter postings under a set of recent “revolution hashtags” (Egypt #jan25, Bahrain/Iran #feb14, Libya #feb17, Algeria #feb19, Morocco #feb20, Cameroon #feb23, Kuwait #Mar8) to analyze digital grassroots uprisings. The aim is to analyze the potential of elusive web spaces as sites of mobilization. Looking at linguistic and social aspects, the main questions are: Is there a common discursive code?; is there a social structure?; and is there commitment over time? With tools from semantic, social network, and discourse analysis I have been able to show that common codes, networks of connections and mobilization do exist in these contexts. These patterns can be seen as part of the elaboration of a “cognitive praxis”. In order to organize and mobilize, any movement needs to speak a common language, agree on the definition of the situation, and formulate a shared vision. Even though it is global and loosely-knit, Twitter discourse is a space where such processes of meaning-production take place. This however is not without friction, and the paper will also take contradictions, pitfalls and conflicts into account.
