Status Update: Social Media from DocNow to DukeU

Brian Norberg

IT Analyst, Trinity Technology Services

brian.norberg@duke.edu

Slides at http://slides.com/briannorberg/documenting-the-now

Documenting the Now

  • Began in 2016 with focus on documenting the  #blacklivesmatter movement, particularly around Ferguson events
  • Funded by Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
  • Partnership between University of Maryland, University of California at Riverside, and Washington University in St. Louis
  • 2 goals: create forum for discussing social media use and build tools that enable better use of social media

DocNow Fora

  • Slack Channel - place for informal conversation and resource collection. Multiple channels (eg, tools, ethics, general, etc.)
  • Medium Group - place for more in depth coverage of conferences, tool development, events, and research connected to social media
  • Twitter - provides updates about happenings around social media and DocNow, as well as push traffic to Medium and Slack channels

DocNow Tools

Focus 180 = monolithic application combining social media collection and web archiving to modular approach, building several tools to address single needs

  • Twarc - command line tool for collecting and visualizing Tweets
  • Tweet Catalog - web-based repository to share Tweet ID sets (Twitter API terms of use issue)
  • Hydrator - desktop app for repopulating twitter data from the tweet id
  • diffengine - utility for monitoring news media through capturing RSS feed changes and sending them to Internet Archive and Twitter

Duke Projects

  • Negar Mottahedeh (English) - Twitter activism in Middle East, Hashtag and Memes

  • Rebecca Stein (Cultural Anthropology) - Israeli state use of social media

  • Chris A. Bail (Sociology) - using Facebook and Twitter to collect survey data for better understanding of collective behavior online.

  • Amadou Fofana (HWL VFF) - documenting mobile cinema in West Africa through Twitter.

  • Jennifer Ahern-Dodson (Thompson Writing Program) - using social media around DSWS and other groups in here student activism class

Duke Tools

Twitter

 -- Social Feed Manager (requires that you use to the Duke VPN to access; login with Twitter credentials)

-- Exploring Twarc, TAGS, and Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Capture and Analysis Toolset (DMI-TCAT)

Instagram

-- Lentil

-- Exploring  Instagram-scraper

Other Social Media

TBD - Have done custom scripting for Facebook and Kickstarter

Duke Tools

Pitfalls of Social Media Research

  • It is hard to develop a method to get thorough results from API calls
  • Social media research is very time sensitive (e.g., Twitter search API only goes back only 7 days)
  • Many social media based API have severe limits (e.g. Twitter only gives you 10% of Tweets, and Instagram requires a special access token just to use the public API)
  • Working with social media is a multi-step process

 

Ethical Pitfalls

  • Is it ethical to use public social media?
  • Dangers of creating public datasets that can be merged with other data to compromise users
  • Taking social media out of context and not properly connecting with media creators
  • Building tools that facilitate misuse (e.g., Fake News or extremists using Internet Archive)

How librarians can help

  • As projects like DocNow become more prevalent and standards for working with social media are solidified, researchers will need to be made aware of these resources and standards.
  • Working with social media is really about working with contemporary primary sources, which is a tough task that requires a lot of different resources (technology, social science methods, data and information specialists, etc.) that span beyond the curriculum. Libraries are well placed to bring multiple groups and resources together and support projects like these moving forward.

What's Next?

 -- Check out Documenting the Now

 

-- Check out NCSU Libraries very good annotated bibliography on researching with social media

 

 -- Attend my workshop, Researching with social media, on March 21 from 3-5 to get a more in depth knowledge of the kind of information that comes from a social media API and what one might do with it.

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