For the talk, I explored how social media platforms have evolved from spaces for personal exchanges to environments for real-time news and information, influencing how media organisations respond to breaking news, how journalists go about their reporting and whose voices are heard. The media logic of emerging communications technologies, where knowledge, expertise and authority are networked and distributed, chafe with existing, hierarchical models of journalism.

The presentation explored how social media are reconfiguring definitions of journalism and professional constructs of the journalist, as media professionals negotiate a hybrid news ecosystem that blurs the line between the public, the private and the corporate

Here are the slides with audio of my talk at MIT8 on May 3, 2013:

The sites have been buzzing with exchanges about what happened and who was responsible.

I argue that far from vigilantism, people are trying to help by having an open and public discussion about who was behind the attack.

Content Analysis in an Era of Big Data: A Hybrid Approach to Computational and Manual Methods is in a special edition of the journal examining the conceptual, political, and practical aspects of emerging methods for digital media research.

Our paper outlines how we leveraged computational methods to magnify what a small set of coders could accomplish in their analysis of Andy Carvin’s tweets related to the Egyptian uprising.

We explain that while computational methods present enticing solutions to research into Big Data, they may be insufficient on their own.

Instead we advance a hybrid approach to analysing Big Data, combining computational and manual approaches in order to get the most out of the precision of algorithms and the context-sensitive evaluations of human coders.

A separate paper on our findings, Sourcing the Arab Spring: A Case Study of Andy Carvin’s Sources on Twitter During the Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions is due to be published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.

Mark Mushet Photograph

My new social media course is featured in the latest issue of UBC Reports.

The course is the first collaboration between the Graduate School of Journalism and the Sauder School of Business.

It brings together journalism and commerce students to work on client projects with media partners such as the Vancouver Sun, Global BC and CBC Music.

I’m co-teaching the course with marketing instructor, Paul Cubbon, so students get both a journalism and business perspective on social media.

UBC Reports quotes the view of Ceilidh MacLeod, a fourth-year Sauder student, after the first day of class:

Many people who work in a social media position often got there through experiential learning, not necessarily provided through their education. This course allows me and my peers to fast track that trial-by-error phase, and become prepared for job opportunities that require familiarity with content creation, branding and experience with relevant tools.

The course was supported by a UBC Teaching and Learning Enhancement Fund (TLEF) grant.