Analysing scholarly contributions to public debate with social media issue mapping: a case study of the Australia Day controversy

Burgess, Jean; Bruns, Axel; Osman, Kim

doi:10.1080/22041451.2019.1689688

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 15 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…A growing body of research is focusing on the emerging roles for academic explanatory journalism initiatives within public communication, mostly notably The Conversation (Burgess et al, 2019; Guenther and Joubert, 2021; Hermida and Young, 2019; Marshall, 2015; Osman and Cunningham, 2020). Launched in Australia in 2011 and later expanded to eight additional editions on four continents and one global edition, The Conversation ( TC ) has been variously described as a vehicle to promote public intellectualism (Marshall, 2015), a research ‘amplifier’ platform (Osman and Cunningham, 2020), an impact platform (Pooley, 2017) and an inter-media agenda setter (Guenther and Joubert, 2021).…”

Section: The Conversation As a (Preprint) Research Amplifiermentioning

confidence: 99%

Academic explanatory journalism and emerging COVID-19 science: how social media accounts amplify The Conversation’s preprint coverage

Fleerackers,

Riedlinger,

Bruns

et al. 2022

Media International Australia

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines the public communication of COVID-19-related ‘preprints’ (unreviewed research studies) in a digital media environment. To understand how preprint research flows from preprint server, to media story, to social media audience, we analysed engagement with ‘second-order citations’ – social media posts linking to media coverage of research – using a sample of 41 media stories published by the research amplifier platform The Conversation (TC) that mentioned preprint research during the early months of the pandemic. We applied content analyses to the Facebook and Twitter accounts sharing these stories and analysed the engagement that the posts received. We found that TC stories mentioning preprints were shared among a diverse collection of Facebook and Twitter accounts, providing a second layer of social media amplification of preprint research. Still, posts by a small proportion of ‘elite’ actors – people with prominent roles in media and communications, politics or academia – tended to generate more engagement.

show abstract

Section: The Conversation As a (Preprint) Research Amplifiermentioning

confidence: 99%

Academic explanatory journalism and emerging COVID-19 science: how social media accounts amplify The Conversation’s preprint coverage

Fleerackers,

Riedlinger,

Bruns

et al. 2022

Media International Australia

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Understanding how amplifier platforms like The Conversation integrate with social media in a complex digital media ecosystem where academic and scientific information sits alongside news, personal updates, and entertainment (Burgess et al, 2019) is important. Increased social media engagement potentially leads to increased reach, and a significant amount of interaction and engagement with academic work happens on social media.…”

Section: Extending the Reach Of Academic Research Via Amplifier Platformsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Conversation, Ten Years On: Assessing the Impact of a Unique Scholarly Publishing Initiative

Riedlinger

Fleerackers

Bruns

et al. 2021

SPIR

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The Conversation (theconversation.com) represents a unique model for communicating scholarly research to the general public via explanatory journalism. Rather than relying on scholars’ personal networks, the promotional efforts of university press offices, or requests from science journalists for comments on current developments, The Conversation offers a platform for scholars across all disciplines to pitch their own stories, gain support from its in-house journalistic staff to develop those stories for a general audience, and see the resulting articles published under Creative Commons licences, enabling them to be republished by commercial and public service news outlets around the world. The overall success of this model, which may be described as ‘journalism-as-a-service’, is evident: articles from The Conversation are regularly republished by major international news outlets from the New York Times through CNN to The Guardian, as well as by domestic outlets across the eight countries and regions in which The Conversation now operates. This panel provides a broad-ranging and multi-faceted assessment of the status of the Conversation project, in its tenth year of operation. The current COVID-19 crisis has particularly highlighted the crisis of expertise and unevenness of scientific literacy amongst journalists, politicians, and the general public. The panel’s assessment of the successes and failures of one of the leading digital science communication initiatives of the past decade provides an important reality check, and offers new insights on what can be done to increase the visibility and impact of rigorous scholarly perspectives from all disciplines of research in public and political debates.

show abstract

‘Fit for purpose’: a showcase of research methods for communication studies research

Mills

2019

Communication Research and Practice

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Our volatile and challenging World is inextricably coupled to a communication landscape where fact and opinion and deliberate fabrications and fantasies co-exist, sometimes fleetingly but often long enough to have the potential to cause harm. Certainly, there is no doubt about the potential for widespread harm when false beliefs (O'Connor & Weatherall, 2019) and fake news (Nair, 2017) inform contemporary debates, especially those on topics of global importance such as climate change, market protection, immigration, immunisation, and energy sustainability. Research is showing that one reason for fearing falsehoods is that they spread faster than truth. For instance, in an epic study published in Science in 2018 that examined rumour cascades on Twitter between 2006 and 2017, information scientists Soroush Vosoughi, Deb Roy, and Sinan Aral (2018) found that true news rarely spreads to more than 1000 readers while false news can easily reach between 1000 and 100,000 people. To fully appreciate how untrustworthy information is promulgated so rapidly and is likely to be readily accepted it is necessary to look beyond the individual and their information processing abilities to social networks, information ecologies, and societal level variables (Scheufele & Krause, 2019). By examining these dimensions, scholars can help the community at large to appreciate the way misinformation is embedded in the political, technological, and societal context (Lewandowsky, Ecker, & Cook, 2017) and is contributing to an epistemic space that is increasingly being called 'the post-truth age' (Lewandowsky et al., 2017); an age where people can eschew once taken-for-granted criteria for evaluating truth claims and, in so doing, create an incoherent model of reality. By taking a wider view on how untrustworthy information is sustained, commentators argue (e.g., Vraga & Bode, 2017) that the likelihood of successfully defining, measuring, targeting and correcting, or mitigating the consequences of falsehoods is increased. Communication scholars' are ideally positioned to contribute to this objective in insightful, critical, and meaningful ways (See Bode & Vraga, 2015). However, just how they go about doing so will be determined by each researcher's ontological position. If they endorse the existence of an objective truth then their methodological decisions will differ from researchers who assume truth is subjective and socially constructed, a product of power and inequality and in need of change, or actually unknowable. This ontological diversity means that not only do researchers choose different research methods but they may not give the same credence to such terms as 'false belief' and 'fake news'. The researcher has to assume that others may not appreciate their ontology and epistemology or the research methods these underpin. This means research methods need to be communicated in sufficient detail to allow the audience to accept their integrity and have confidence in the findings. Otherwise, researchers risk becoming yet another untruste...

show abstract

Analysing scholarly contributions to public debate with social media issue mapping: a case study of the Australia Day controversy

Cited by 3 publications

References 15 publications

Academic explanatory journalism and emerging COVID-19 science: how social media accounts amplify The Conversation’s preprint coverage

Academic explanatory journalism and emerging COVID-19 science: how social media accounts amplify The Conversation’s preprint coverage

The Conversation, Ten Years On: Assessing the Impact of a Unique Scholarly Publishing Initiative

‘Fit for purpose’: a showcase of research methods for communication studies research

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About