Guest lecture in Uppsala

Just back in Oslo from a guest lecture in Uppsala – at the department where I worked for several years and got my Ph. D. I was invited by the alumni organisation at the university to talk about some of my ongoing research regarding the 2018 Swedish election. Hopefully I’ll be able to present some of this research in a more formalised setting sooner rather than later.

Presentations accepted at the 2018 ECREA conference

The dust has settled following the review process for the seventh bi-annual European Communication Conference, to be held this year in Lugano, Switzerland. Three submissions that I was involved with were accepted for presentation:

… sort of a “mixed bag” of my research interests – mostly political communication, but also a presentation based on my ongoing collaboration with Gry Cecilie Rustad (university of Oslo) regarding Instagram fan engagement with the popular Norwegian webb-tv-series Skam.

Convergence editorial board membership


I am pleased to announce that I have accepted the offer to serve on the editorial board of
Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. A truly interdisciplinary journal, Convergence features scholarship emanating from humanities and from the social sciences. As I mostly associate myself with the latter of these two overarching disciplines, I look forward to playing a part in shaping the output of the journal in this regard in the coming years.

Exchange in Antwerp

Spending a couple of days at the University of Antwerpen, Department of Communication Studies as part of an ERASMUS staff mobility exchange, hosted by Hilde Van den Bulck. While here, I’ve guest lectured in a journalism studies class organised by Steve Paulussen and a political communication class organised by Peter Van Aelst. Moreover, I had a nice opportunity to discuss the possibilities and pitfalls of digital methods and data gathering from social media with a few doctoral students who are working on really interesting projects.

 

Presenting at ICA in San Diego

Picture from Stephen Cushion on Twitter.

I may look somewhat reserved in the picture above, but in reality, I had a good time at the Journalism Studies Division PhD Colloquium. I commented on a paper and, as seen above, took part in a panel on career management for (comparably) younger scholars. Others taking part in the panel were Valerie Belair-Gagnon, Nikki Usher and Edson Tandoc Jr.

Besides the colloquium, I was involved in two other presentations – one in a preconference on online commenting, “Comments, Anyone? Multidisciplinary Approaches for Analyzing Online User Comments Across News and Other Content Formats”, where a collaborative project involving myself, Karoline Andrea Ihlebæk and Anders Sundnes Løvlie was presented by Karoline. Moreover, I presented my own work regarding the uses of Instagram by politicians and parties during a session of the main conference organised by the political communication division.

Quick visit to Quebec

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Just got back from Quebec City and from the fifth edition of the International workshop on political communication (pdf) as hosted by the Groupe de recherche en communication politique at the Université Laval in general and by Thierry Giasson in particular. While travelling to Quebec to stay there for merely three days is not optimal, I enjoyed the workshop, which featured myself and four other invited guests providing extensive presentations and taking questions for a similarly extended period of time. A demanding format, but interesting and very useful. I presented on the uses of social media by Scandinavian politicians, focusing specifically on what types of content as posted by parties and politicians that seem to “work” – as in receiving comparably higher numbers of “likes” or shares.

Good times in Odense

… and for those who are interested in what I talked about, the paper can be found here (or indeed on academia.edu or ResearchGate).

 

Spending the week in Denmark

170321-Presenting at the ITU, Copenhagen

Thanks to Luca Rossi for the picture on the right. I took the one on the left myself.

I’m spending the week in Denmark, presenting some of my ongoing research for the DECIDIS group at the IT-University of Copenhagen. Focusing on online political communication, my paper “Baking, skiing – governing. Exploring the popularity of personalised posts on Norwegian political instagram accounts” tries to assess what type of content appear to yield higher levels of popularity when it comes to Instagram account operated by politicians.

Tomorrow, I’m off to Odense and the ECREA Journalism Studies Conference 2017. As such, the rest of the week will be spent pondering and presenting on journalism research.

I originally wanted to title this “Anger is an Energy”

Update 17-02-08: The paper is now available on the journal web page, more specifically here.

A paper I wrote on the uses of Facebook Reactions – the diversified forms of likes that were rolled out by the specified platform during the spring of 2016 – was recently accepted for publication in Journalism Practice. The abstract can be found below, and the pre-print version of the paper is available at academia.edu or ResearchGate.

News sharing and commenting is arguably one of the most interesting aspects of how news are consumed and interacted with online. Finding answers to questions regarding who engages in these ways, what type of content gets engaged with and why certain items are shared and commented upon but not others are of the utmost importance for those who want to navigate the complex echo system of online news flows. The paper at hand addresses the latter two of the three posed questions – what gets shared or commented, and why – in the context of the social networking site Facebook. Detailing the influences of Reactions, an expansion of the ‘Like’ button launched during the spring of 2016, the presented analyses find that Reactions such as Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry emerge as somewhat unpopular in relation to the original Like functionality. Moreover, while more positive forms Reactions appear to have a hampering effect on the willingness of news consumers on Facebook to engage by means of sharing and commenting, more negative varieties of Facebook Reactions appear to yield adverse influences

The paper generated some interest from a few journalists:

Lavik, Maria (2016). Mislik og del. Klassekampen, december 28th. Available here (pdf).

Gilberg, Lars (2016). Følelsen av at fakta er feil. Vårt Land, december 6th. Available here(pdf).

Skarsgård, Marianne L. (2016). Nyhetene som deles mest på FacebookHegnar.no, december 5th.

Amdahl, Pernille (2016). Sinte nyheter deles mest. Interview on NRK public service radio regarding news sharing on social media. Broadcast december 5th.

Eckblad, Bjørn (2016). «Sinte» nyheter deles mest på Facebook. Feature on news sharing on social media in Dagens Næringsliv, december 5th. Available here (pdf).

… and as for the original title, it was inspired by – or perhaps rather stolen from – the lyrics of a certain angry brit. Also, this.