Monday, June 18, 2007

Update

Last months, I' ve been very busy doing research for my Phd study. That is why I did not find time to update this blog, my apologies for that.

On the other hand, I'm very happy with past activities. Two months ago, I presented a paper at the GOR-congress in Leipzig. The reactions on my paper about studying online news media were interesting and helped me a lot with my study. Since then, I've been adjusting the concepts and units for my second content analysis of the online coverage of the elections. Last year in october, I studied the structure and form of the online messages that covered the municipal elections. One week ago, I repeated this kind of study, now with the federal elections on June, 10. However it is too early to announce some important conclusions, it is clear that the online news media have been evolving during the past months. Most of the online news media used a greater amount of multimodality, interactivity and hypertext in contrast with last year. The finding of this content analysis will be described in one or more articles about the (evolution of) use of these features in online coverage of elections or political news in general.

In addition, I've put a survey online that questions the use of online news by students and staff from the Lessius University College in Antwerp. The purpose of this study is to determine the digital divide in use of online news by people who belong to the same group, which have more or less the same cognitive development and the same possibilities to access the internet. We assume that the differences in the use of interactive, hypertextual and multimodal features will differ a lot among respondents, even when they belong to the same group and make a plead for the study of divides in use rather than studying differences in access. I will present some of the general conclusion already at the IAMCR-conference in Paris, july, 25. (Attention: you mustn't participate in the online survey if you are nor a student, nor a staff member of the Lessius University College!)

My last anouncement is that next week, I'm going to present a paper which is titled "online journalism and interactivity: studying control, conversation and self-production from an cognitive and methodological approach" at the I3-conference (Informations: interaction and impact) in Aberdeen, Schotland.

To conclude: busy times, but interesting times!

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