VOSON Lab participates in #ASNAC2020

The VOSON Lab participated in various events during the 5th Australian Social Network Analysis Conference [ASNAC 2020], held on November 25th-27th Perth, Western Australia.

Rob Ackland introduced the VOSON Lab open-source R tools: vosonSML and VOSONDash in the pre-conference workshop "VOSON Lab Tools for Collecting and Analysing Online Networks", held on November 25, 2020.

Rob presented: "Using Semantic Network Analysis to Identify Meaning Structures on Twitter". This research, co-authored by University of Canberra researchers Matthieu O'Neil and Michael Jensen, aims at operationalising Twitter data for researching issues, with particular focus on how dynamic semantic network analysis of hashtags can be used to identify “meaning structures” on Twitter and track their change over time.

Since this year's conference had to be hosted fully online, a virtual space was organised to socialise and present posters. We presented our first-ever online poster introducing the VOSON lab R tools, the new features: hyperlink collection in vosonSML, as well as opportunities for development to study dynamic networks and Twitter conversation networks.

The study "A novel network-based approach to detecting and analysing coordinated inauthentic behaviour on Twitter", presented by Tim Graham (University of Queensland) and co-authored by Rob Ackland, introduced a network approach to studying coordinated inauthentic behaviour, i.e. how can networks reveal the structural patterns of coordination that underpin CIB? New methods were discussed using Twitter datasets, collected by the VOSON Lab, covering the US Presidential debates 2020.