Tim Highfield
Queensland University of Technology, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, Vice-Chancellor's Research Fellow
My PhD thesis compared political blogging in France and Australia, using a data set of posts and links collected by research associates at Sociomantic Labs between January and August 2009. Completed and graduated from Queensland University of Technology, end 2011.
Currently I am a Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (QUT) in the Media Ecologies project (http://mappingonlinepublics.net).
I am also a Sessional Academic for Curtin University/Open Universities Australia.
Some information can be found at my website - http://timhighfield.net/
Research papers can be accessed from QUT's eprints site: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Highfield,_Timothy.html
Currently I am a Research Fellow at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation (QUT) in the Media Ecologies project (http://mappingonlinepublics.net).
I am also a Sessional Academic for Curtin University/Open Universities Australia.
Some information can be found at my website - http://timhighfield.net/
Research papers can be accessed from QUT's eprints site: http://eprints.qut.edu.au/view/person/Highfield,_Timothy.html
less
InterestsView All (8)
Uploads
Papers by Tim Highfield
– through the analytical lens of specific hashtags on the Instagram
platform. These ends are examined in tandem in an attempt to
surface commonalities in the way that individuals use visual social
media when sharing information about other people. A range of
emerging norms in digital discourses about birth and death are
uncovered, and it is significant that in both cases the individuals
being talked about cannot reply for themselves. Issues of agency
in representation therefore frame the analysis. After sorting
through a number of entry points, images and videos with the
#ultrasound and #funeral hashtags were tracked for three months
in 2014. Ultrasound images and videos on Instagram revealed a
range of communication and representation strategies, most
highlighting social experiences and emotional peaks. There are,
however, also significant privacy issues as a significant proportion
of public accounts share personally identifiable metadata about
the mother and unborn child, although these issue are not
apparent in relation to funeral images. Unlike other social media
platforms, grief on Instagram is found to be more about personal
expressions of loss rather than affording spaces of collective
commemoration. A range of related practices and themes, such as
commerce and humour, were also documented as a part of the
spectrum of activity on the Instagram platform. Norms specific to
each collection emerged from this analysis, which are then
compared to document research about other social media
platforms, especially Facebook.
This paper examines Twitter’s use within the Occupy Oakland movement. We use a mixture of ethnographic research through interviews with activists and participant observation of the movements’ activities, and a dataset of public tweets containing the #oo hashtag from early 2012. This research methodology allows us to develop a more accurate and nuanced understanding of how movement activists use Twitter by cross–checking trends in the online data with observations and activists’ own reported use of Twitter. We also study the connections between a geographically focused movement such as Occupy Oakland and related, but physically distant, protests taking place concurrently in other cities. This study forms part of a wider research project, Mapping Movements, exploring the politics of place, investigating how social movements are composed and sustained, and the uses of online communication within these movements.
This paper underlines the increasing importance of visual elements to digital, social, and mobile media within everyday life, addressing the significant research gap in methods for tracking, analysing, and understanding visual social media as both image-based and intertextual content. In this paper, we build on our previous methodological considerations of Instagram in isolation (Highfield & Leaver, 2015) to examine further questions, challenges, and benefits of studying visual social media more broadly, including methodological and ethical considerations. Our discussion is intended as a rallying cry and provocation for further research into visual (and textual, and mixed) social media content, practices, and cultures, mindful of both the specificities of each form, but also, and importantly, the ongoing dialogues and interrelations between them as communication forms.
This project will look at political blogging in Australia and France - sites commenting on or promoting political events and ideas, and run by citizens, politicians, and journalists alike. In doing so, the structure of networks formed by bloggers and the nature of communication within political blogospheres will be examined. Previous studies of political blogging around the world have focussed on individual nations, finding that in some cases the networks are divided between different political ideologies. By comparing two countries with different political representation (two-party dominated system vs. a wider political spectrum), this study will determine the structure of these political blogospheres, and correlate these structures with the political environment in which they are situated.
The thesis adapts concepts from communication and media theories, including framing, agenda setting, and opinion leaders, to examine the work of political bloggers and their place within the mediasphere. As well as developing a hybrid theoretical base for research into blogs and other online communication, the project outlines new methodologies for carrying out studies of online activity through the analysis of several topical networks within the wider activity collected for this project. The project draws on hyperlink and textual data collected from a sample of Australian and French blogs between January and August 2009. From this data, the thesis provides an overview of "everyday" political blogging, showing posting patterns over several months of activity, away from national elections and their associated campaigns. However, while other work in this field has looked solely at cumulative networks, treating collected data as a static network, this project will also look at specific cases to see how the blogospheres change with time and topics of discussion. Three case studies are used within the thesis to examine how blogs cover politics, featuring an international political event (the Obama inauguration), and local political topics (the opposition to the "Création et Internet", or HADOPI, law in France, the "Utegate" scandal in Australia).
By using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, the study analyses data collected from a population of sites from both countries, looking at their linking patterns, relationship with mainstream media, and topics of interest. This project will subsequently help to further develop methodologies in this field and provide new and detailed information on both online networks and internet-based political communication in Australia and France.
Talks by Tim Highfield
– through the analytical lens of specific hashtags on the Instagram
platform. These ends are examined in tandem in an attempt to
surface commonalities in the way that individuals use visual social
media when sharing information about other people. A range of
emerging norms in digital discourses about birth and death are
uncovered, and it is significant that in both cases the individuals
being talked about cannot reply for themselves. Issues of agency
in representation therefore frame the analysis. After sorting
through a number of entry points, images and videos with the
#ultrasound and #funeral hashtags were tracked for three months
in 2014. Ultrasound images and videos on Instagram revealed a
range of communication and representation strategies, most
highlighting social experiences and emotional peaks. There are,
however, also significant privacy issues as a significant proportion
of public accounts share personally identifiable metadata about
the mother and unborn child, although these issue are not
apparent in relation to funeral images. Unlike other social media
platforms, grief on Instagram is found to be more about personal
expressions of loss rather than affording spaces of collective
commemoration. A range of related practices and themes, such as
commerce and humour, were also documented as a part of the
spectrum of activity on the Instagram platform. Norms specific to
each collection emerged from this analysis, which are then
compared to document research about other social media
platforms, especially Facebook.
This paper examines Twitter’s use within the Occupy Oakland movement. We use a mixture of ethnographic research through interviews with activists and participant observation of the movements’ activities, and a dataset of public tweets containing the #oo hashtag from early 2012. This research methodology allows us to develop a more accurate and nuanced understanding of how movement activists use Twitter by cross–checking trends in the online data with observations and activists’ own reported use of Twitter. We also study the connections between a geographically focused movement such as Occupy Oakland and related, but physically distant, protests taking place concurrently in other cities. This study forms part of a wider research project, Mapping Movements, exploring the politics of place, investigating how social movements are composed and sustained, and the uses of online communication within these movements.
This paper underlines the increasing importance of visual elements to digital, social, and mobile media within everyday life, addressing the significant research gap in methods for tracking, analysing, and understanding visual social media as both image-based and intertextual content. In this paper, we build on our previous methodological considerations of Instagram in isolation (Highfield & Leaver, 2015) to examine further questions, challenges, and benefits of studying visual social media more broadly, including methodological and ethical considerations. Our discussion is intended as a rallying cry and provocation for further research into visual (and textual, and mixed) social media content, practices, and cultures, mindful of both the specificities of each form, but also, and importantly, the ongoing dialogues and interrelations between them as communication forms.
This project will look at political blogging in Australia and France - sites commenting on or promoting political events and ideas, and run by citizens, politicians, and journalists alike. In doing so, the structure of networks formed by bloggers and the nature of communication within political blogospheres will be examined. Previous studies of political blogging around the world have focussed on individual nations, finding that in some cases the networks are divided between different political ideologies. By comparing two countries with different political representation (two-party dominated system vs. a wider political spectrum), this study will determine the structure of these political blogospheres, and correlate these structures with the political environment in which they are situated.
The thesis adapts concepts from communication and media theories, including framing, agenda setting, and opinion leaders, to examine the work of political bloggers and their place within the mediasphere. As well as developing a hybrid theoretical base for research into blogs and other online communication, the project outlines new methodologies for carrying out studies of online activity through the analysis of several topical networks within the wider activity collected for this project. The project draws on hyperlink and textual data collected from a sample of Australian and French blogs between January and August 2009. From this data, the thesis provides an overview of "everyday" political blogging, showing posting patterns over several months of activity, away from national elections and their associated campaigns. However, while other work in this field has looked solely at cumulative networks, treating collected data as a static network, this project will also look at specific cases to see how the blogospheres change with time and topics of discussion. Three case studies are used within the thesis to examine how blogs cover politics, featuring an international political event (the Obama inauguration), and local political topics (the opposition to the "Création et Internet", or HADOPI, law in France, the "Utegate" scandal in Australia).
By using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, the study analyses data collected from a population of sites from both countries, looking at their linking patterns, relationship with mainstream media, and topics of interest. This project will subsequently help to further develop methodologies in this field and provide new and detailed information on both online networks and internet-based political communication in Australia and France.
by Dr Tim Highfield, QUT @timhighfield
Social Media Research Group
& Dr Tama Leaver, Curtin University @tamaleaver
Department of Internet Studies
However, the growing use of big data, social media-oriented approaches in the study of social movements raises new analytical and ethical challenges. There are important differences between big data research methodologies and previous approaches to social movement research, including a radically altered relationship between researchers and movement participants. Social media data capture and analysis around these topics can be carried out without having to be physically near or involved in the movements in question, which raises concerns about how to evaluate potential risks to participants; reciprocity; the accessibility of research to activists, including for comment and criticism; and how researchers engage with movement participants as knowledge-producers. Analytically, the use of big data methods for social movement research requires a careful attention to the biases in available data. Biases and gaps in the data may be introduced through strategic avoidance of social media or self-censorship by activists; the limitations of platform architecture and content policies; practices such as subtweeting and screen-capping which deliberately obscure links between accounts; the use of images and other non-text forms not captured by big data tools; the openness of different social media platforms to data capture; and the limitations of data capture tools themselves.
In response to these challenges and concerns, we advocate the use of a mixed-methods approach that combines participant observation, in-depth interviews, and big data methods. This approach offers a framework for balancing the benefits of new quantitative methods with a need to prioritise an ethical approach to social movement research, as well as correcting some of the biases introduced by big data methods. This approach has been developed through the Mapping Movements project, which has examined movements and events in North America, Africa, and Europe. This chapter draws most prominently on the first published case study of the project, looking at the use of Twitter within the Occupy Oakland movement (Croeser & Highfield, 2014). This research demonstrates that a mixed-methods approach allows a better understanding of the contexts of social movements and their uses of social media. Considering both the online and the physical aspects of social movements enables a nuanced analysis of social media use by activists, looking beyond the object of study (the social medium of choice) at a quantitative level, to examine the intersections between these aspects of social movements. Crucially, our work demonstrates how blended methods can combine the strengths of different research approaches to collectively overcome the limitations of big, social media data, providing detail and explanation for activity found in – and hidden from – these datasets, addressing some of the gaps in big data research. We have not, however, dealt with the Occupy Oakland case study in detail here; rather, we have attempted to outline some of the most pressing ethical and analytical issues for big data research on social movements which are more broadly relevant, and to offer potential avenues which may provide (partial) solutions.