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Ben O’Loughlin and Nick Anstead will be speaking at Google@Scholars: Data Opportunities and Challenges (co-sponsored by the Google Forum, Google and the Economic and Social Research Council) on 21 November 2011 in London. The day includes presentations from Fiona Armstrong of the ESRC and Theo Bertram of Google. Sessions will involve finding and consolidating digital ‘traces’ and using Google Tools for social science research.
Thanks to Sarah Oates for organising the event.
Ben O'Loughlin is among the speakers on 10 November 2011 at a workshop Digital Methods: Tools for Analysis held at the University of Manchester. This workshop brings together leading international scholars developing and applying innovative new methods to analyse web 2.0 applications. The focus of the workshop is on new methodologies for capturing and analysing social media data from applications such as blogs, social networking, micro-blogging or video sharing sites and hyperlinks. Ben will present the latest version of his research with Nick Anstead, "Semantic Polling: the 2010 UK General Election and Real-Time Opinion Monitoring". Based on recent interviews with pollsters, party strategies, data mining companies and electoral regulators, the research shows how different actors made use of real-time public opinion polling through social media - semantic polling - in the 2010 UK General Election.
View list of participants and workshop agenda
Participation is free but registration is required as the number of places is limited.
If you are interested in participating please contact the organisers at contact.projectcode@gmail.com
On Tuesday 8th November PIRSoc, our student-led Politics Society, will host the term's first careers event with BBC One's David Thompson.
Mr Thompson is a journalist on The Politics Show, shown weekly on BBC 1, and has previously been a Westminster Lobby correspondent for Scotland's best selling daily paper, the Daily Record.
David will be speaking about his experiences working in journalism as well as giving advice on how you can become a political journalist.
PIRSoc hope to see you there, the event will be taking place at 6:30pm - 7:30pm in ABLT1.
Further details are available here: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=171329789617388. Follow PIRSoc on Twitter: @RHUL_PIRSoc
Date and time: Thursday 3 November 2011, 5–7pm
Venue: Seminar Room 109, 66 Oakfield Avenue
It makes decreasing sense to speak of media and crisis in isolation. As the media insinuates itself into the everyday in the developed and the developing world, it becomes a pervasive tool for both perpetrating and assuaging crises, for garnering revolutions and for intervention by citizens and enforcement agencies/first responders, and as an emergent source for later legitimizing or contesting such actions in broader mainstream news and political discourses.
Prof. Andrew Hoskins (University of Glasgow); Prof. Ben O’Loughlin (Royal Holloway University); Dr Pieter Verdegem (Uppsala University); Dr Jennifer Giroux (ETH Zurich); Dr Karen Renaud (University of Glasgow); Prof. Michele Burman (University of Glasgow (TBC))
To reserve a place, please email Frances.Gaughan@glasgow.ac.uk
As part of the ESRC Doctoral Training Centre we are pleased to welcome scholarship applications from well-qualified applicants. The ESRC DTC is in partnership with the universities of Kent, Reading and Surrey. Further details of the ESRC DTC South East can be found here. The ESRC DTC has a total of 24 fully funded PhD scholarships available.
The deadline for applications for ESRC funding is 10th February 2012. Offers to successful candidates should go out the week before Easter (which is on 6th to 9th April). Full details on ESRC PhD funding can be found here.
Applications and Admissions
Applications from students who wish to be considered for ESRC funding should be made directly to the Department of Politics and International Relations. The Department welcomes applications from highly qualified and motivated candidates. The application process for our postgraduate research programmes is an interactive one. We place great emphasis on matching prospective students to supervisors’ interests, building on our existing research activities. Those interested in conducting a PhD within the New Political Communication Unit should consider how their research interests overlap with its current members.
Interested potential applicants should first refer to our website to obtain a good idea of the department's research foci: http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Politics-and-IR/About-Us/. The Department is only able to consider applications in research areas of interest to its full-time academic staff.
In the first instance, potential applicants should prepare a research proposal, outlining the project that they will undertake if accepted onto the PhD programme. This should be at least 8-10 pages long and should include the key research questions, hypothesis, proposed methodology and a bibliography. Email this research proposal, along with a cv, to the Director of Graduate Study, Dr Alister Miskimmon.
If the proposal is met with interest by a potential supervisor, the Director of Graduate Study will invite the potential applicant to discuss their proposal further via email. UK-based applicants may be invited to visit the Department. Promising potential applicants will then be advised to apply formally for a place on our PhD programme. Candidates shortlisted for the PhD programme will be interviewed.
Potential applicants may contact the Director of Graduate Study with proposals at any stage of the academic year. For the 2011/12 academic year, the deadline for formal applications from applicants wishing to be considered for funding opportunities is 10 February 2012.
2.00–6.00 pm, 2 November, The Attlee Suite, Portcullis House, Westminster
Organised by the University of Manchester and the Hansard Society
This roundtable, organised as part of the ESRC Festival of Social Science and taking place during Parliament Week (Oct 31 – Nov 6) brings together academics, politicians, activists, news producers and journalists to debate how social media are being used to promote protest and political change.
The discussion will look at the use of Twitter & Facebook and examine the development of social media based protest and how digital strategies for action are rapidly coalescing and becoming essential to any modern-day campaign. Finally, it will examine the role of ‘old’ media in facilitating and promoting the success of new media campaigns and ask if digital activism and online exposure are sufficient to drive the momentum offline or if it requires mainstream media coverage.
Agenda
2.00 – 2.30: Welcome, Registration and Refreshments
2.30 – 4.00: Roundtable discussion: The view from the ‘inside’ – Practitioners. Chair: Dr Andy Williamson.
- Mark Pack, Blogger (LibDemVoice)
- Dr Julian Huppert MP
- Baroness Deech
- Elizabeth Linder, Politics & Government Specialist (Facebook)
4.00 – 4.15: Refreshments
4.15 – 6.00: Roundtable discussion: The view from ‘outside’ – Media & Academic analysis.
Chair: Prof Rachel Gibson (University of Manchester).
- Matthew Eltringham (BBC UGC Hub)
- Alberto Nardelli (Tweetminster)
- Professor Andrew Chadwick (University of London, Royal Holloway)
For more information and to register for this event, please click here.
issue 1
Reconnecting Political Disconnection
Call for Papers: Reconnecting Political Disconnection
Winter 2010 to Summer 2011 saw surprising political processes and events: massive political upheaval and transformation in formerly undemocratic countries, on the one hand, and the apparent ineffectuality of widespread discontent and protest in many ‘democratic’ countries on the other. At the same time, new and old forms of media and journalism technology and practice had disparate effects: some appeared to enable political connection, movement and transformation, while others worked to disconnect, close down and preserve stasis. This issue of JOMEC, Reconnecting Political Disconnection, invites contributions which engage with what is to be learned from these complex conjunctions in which new and old forms of journalism, media, cultural and political practice converge and operate in competing ways.
Submission guidelines:
Abstracts: 100-500 words
Deadline for abstracts: Friday 11th November 2011
Contributor details: 100-200 words (position, institution, publications, etc.)
Deadline for first draft submissions: End February 2012.
Article Length: 1,000-6,000 words.
Journal Referencing Style: Harvard
Contact: Paul Bowman: BowmanP@cf.ac.uk
Next week, as part of the Department of Politics and International Relations Research Seminar Series, Professor Colin Davis from the Department of Psychology here at Royal Holloway will discuss his research on the social-psychological effects of televised election debates.
Details:
Colin Davis (Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway) "Social influence in televised election debates: a potential distortion of democracy"
October 18, 2011.
Room: FW101.
Time: 5.15pm.
All Welcome!
Ben O'Loughlin and Alister Miskimmon will give the keynote address at the ISA-South 2011 Conference. The conference will take place October 13-15, 2011 at the Elon University; Elon, North Carolina, USA. The theme of this year’s conference is the exploration of political communication and international studies, broadly conceived. Ben and Alister will talk about their Strategic Narratives research programme.
They will also participate on a roundtable with Fritz Mayer, Harvard University, where Ben will talk about the narratives of crisis around Iran's nuclear programme, and Alister will discuss Germany's attempts to narrate a role for itself in world politics since the end of the Cold War.
See the ISA-South 2011 conference page for more details. ISA South is a regional body of the International Studies Association (ISA).
The 
journal Global Policy has published Ben O'Loughlin's review article, 'Information Overload, Paradigm Underload? The Internet and Political Disruption'. The article reviews the latest books from James Gleick, Evgeny Morozov, Clay Shirky and Tim Wu.
Click here to download it or email Ben.OLoughlin@rhul.ac.uk for a copy if you don't have a subscription.
Global Policy is an innovative and interdisciplinary journal bringing together world class academics and leading practitioners to analyse both public and private solutions to global problems and issues.