JOURNAL ARTICLES

Ackland, R, O'Neil, M. and S. Park (2019). "Engagement with News on Twitter: Insights from Australia and Korea," Asian Journal of Communication, special issue on Introducing Computational Social Science for Asia-Pacific Communication Research. 29(3), 235-251. https://doi.org/10.1080/01292986.2018.1462393

O’Neil, M. & Ackland, R. (2019). "Risk issue adoption in an online social movement field," Information, Communication & Society, 23(13), 1854-1873. DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1620823

Robertson, C., Dutton, W., Ackland, R. and T-Q. Peng (2019). "The Democratic Role of Social Media in Political Debates: The Use of Twitter in the First Televised US Presidential Debate of 2016," Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 16(2), 105-118.

Ackland, R. and D. Halpin (2019). "Change or stability in the structure of interest group networks? Evidence from Scottish public policy consultations," Journal of Public Policy, 39(2), 267-294. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0143814X18000065. Replication dataset (hosted on dataverse)

BOOK CHAPTERS

O'Neil, M. and R. Ackland (2019). "Online Field Theory," in M. Allen, J. Hunsinger & L. Klastrup (eds), International Handbook of Internet Studies Vol.2. Springer: Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1202-4_9-2

WORKING PAPERS

Graham, T. and R. Ackland (2019). "Monadic network analysis," under review.

GRANTS

Volkswagen Foundation (Planning Grant) for "Unbiased Bots That Build Bridges (U3B): Technical Systems that Support Deliberation and Diversity as a Chance for Political Discourse", P. Cimiano, R. Ackland, E. Esposito, T. Graham, M. Hartung, F. Muhle, O. Putz, B. Schiffhauer, U. Seelmeyer; Euro 149,700 (ANU component: $65,407); 2019-2020.

ANU Global Research Partnership Scheme to establish the "ANU Social Dynamics of Attention Centre". (R. Ackland, A. Mackenzie, M. Rahisi, D. Halpin, J. Stachurski, F. Muhle (Bielefeld University, Germany) and T. Venturini (Centre for Internet and Society, National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France); $40,000, 2019-2020).

CONFERENCE/WORKSHOP/SEMINAR PRESENTATIONS

At the 4th Australian Social Network Analysis Conference (ASNAC) , held 28-29 November 2019 at Flinders University, Adelaide:

  • Rob Ackland presented the study "The deliberative potential of online discussion: An analysis of dynamic threaded conversation networks on Reddit" at the 4th ASNAC conference, held on November 28-29, 2019 at Flinders University, Adelaide.
  • Mahin Raissi presented a study that assesses the role and impact of socialbots and trolls on political conversations on Twitter, during the 2016 US presidential election.
  • Rob Ackland and Bryan Gertzel ran the pre-ASNAC conference Workshop: VOSON Lab Tools for Collecting and Analysing Online Networks.

Rob Ackland presented "Mapping influence in online spaces" at "2nd French-Australian Forum on Policy Analytics: Recoupling knowledge, values and process for improved public policy in the 21st century", held at the ANU, 6-7th June 2019.

Rob Ackland presented "Mapping Australia’s Blockchain Ecosystem: Insights from Digital Trace Data" at the “Foundations of Blockchain Empirical Science” workshop, RMIT University, Melbourne on April 18, 2019.

Rob Ackland co-organised and presented at the workshop "Economics and Computational Behavioural Science", held on the 29th of March, 2019 at the University of Melbourne. The workshop was part of an ARC Centre of Excellence (CoE) for Computational Behavioural Science proposal and was aimed to further explore connections between Economics and Computational Behavioural Science.

  • Jamsheed Shorish presented "Networks and Incentives"
  • Rob Ackland's presentation was "Revealed Preference and Retweeting Behaviour"

Tommaso Venturini ran the seminar: From fake news to online attention hyper-synchronisation (March 18, 2019). 

Rob Ackland, RSSS visitor Tommaso Venturini and Adrian Mackenzie organised and hosted the inaugural RSSS Data sprint 2019, held on February 20-22, 2019. Sessions included:

  • Workshop: Intro to R and collecting social media network/text data (Rob Ackland)
  • Workshop: Text analysis in R using quanteda (Ken Benoit, Kohei Watanabe)
  • Workshop: Visualising networks in Gephi (Tommaso Venturini)
  • The Data Sprint, dedicated to explore various types of "Dynamics of Attention in Social Media”, using Reddit datasets (Rob Ackland, Tommaso Venturini and Adrian Mackenzie).

Rob Ackland gave the presentation "Researching How News Stories Spread on Twitter" at The Catalyst at FCAD, Ryerson University, 23 January 2019.

Rob Ackland gave the presentation "What were the bots up to during the 2016 US presidential election?" at the Social Media Lab, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University, 22 January 2019.

EVENTS ORGANISED

Rob Ackland, RSSS visitor Tommaso Venturini and Adrian Mackenzie organised and hosted the inaugural RSSS Data sprint 2019, held on February 20-22, 2019. 

VISITORS

Dr Tommaso Venturini  is researcher at the Center Internet and Society of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). He is also associate researcher of INRA and of the Médialab of Sciences Po Paris and founder of the Public Data Lab. RSSS visiting fellow (February-March, 2019).

Dr Jamsheed Shorish, Honorary Associate Professor at School of Sociology & VOSON Lab, Australian National University, visited the ANU to co-teach at the Economic Analysis of the Digital Economy course , and to collaborate in a research project and publications (March 25 to April 5, 2019). 

TRAINING PROGRAMS

4-8 February 2019 - "Big Data Analysis for Social Scientists" 5-day course held at the 2018 ACSPRI Summer Program, University of Melbourne (R. Ackland) (ACSPRI page) (course page).

14-!5 August 2019 - "Big Data Analysis for Social Scientists" 2-day ACSPRI masterclass held at Deakin University.