Capturing the Ephemeral: Collecting Social Media with Social Feed Manager
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This project summarizes the development and use of Social Feed Manager (SFM), a software tool created by George Washington University Libraries to collect social media data from Twitter. SFM allows researchers to save the time of manually collecting tweets through tools like Google Reader and Excel. It addresses the challenge of collecting ephemeral social media for archives and research by automatically tracking Twitter accounts and saving tens of thousands of tweets. The libraries have used SFM to document student life at GWU by collecting tweets from hundreds of student organizations not otherwise archived. They aim to improve SFM for broader research and archival needs through ongoing collaboration.
Capturing the Ephemeral: Collecting Social Media with Social Feed Manager
- 1. Capturing the Ephemeral: Collecting Social Media with Social Feed Manager @bergisjules @dchud @dankerchner @liblaura George Washington University Libraries CNI Fall Forum - 2013-12-09 - Washington, DC
- 2. This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services Grant LG-46-13-0257
- 3. a traditional project ● save the time of the researcher ● at-risk e-resources, licensing ● expand scope of collection development
- 4. save the time of the researcher
- 5. "How Mainstream News Outlets Use Twitter" (2011) ● GWU's Prof. Kimberly Gross and students ● Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism ● "news agenda these organizations promoted on Twitter closely matches that of their legacy platforms" journalism.org/2011/11/14/how-mainstream-media-outlets-use-twitter/
- 6. Q: How did they collect their data? A: By hand. ● ● ● ● ● google reader copy and paste fold, spindle, mutilate excel ...eventually, SPSS and similar tools
- 7. will take any help they can get
- 8. too much work for too little data (only 1000s of tweets)
- 9. copy and paste to excel doesn't scale (just ask her students)
- 10. over 5,000 theses and dissertations since 2010
- 11. saving time of researchers: strategic advantage
- 12. what researchers ask for • specific users, keywords • basic values: user, date, text, counts • 10000s, not 10000000s • delimited files to import • historic time periods
- 15. data providers • friendly • not cheap* • more than we need • still need tools to collect, process, etc.
- 16. what can we do ourselves?
- 17. lobster traps Karpf, David. “Social Science Research Methods in Internet Time.” Information, Communication, and Society. Volume 15, Issue 5 (May 2012) pp. 639-661.
- 18. when Congress turned over • 16+ accounts deleted / hidden • combined 105,993 followers • 14,479 tweets saved in SFM no longer public
- 19. @GWUArchives is using Social Feed Manager to better document student life and university culture at #GWU. #cni13f
- 20. for University Archives ● practical tool ○ instant value ■ addresses collection development gap ● document student organizations
- 21. why Student Org records ● ● ● ● ● interest from university admin great representation student activity difficult collecting area not in University Archives active social media users
- 22. #GWU on Twitter ● highly active user community ○ students, administrators, offices ● over 400 student organizations ○ greek, cultural, social, political, activist ○ exclusively on Twitter ○ no other web presence
- 23. what we’ve collected ● since March 2013 ● tracking 329 accounts ● 216,371 tweets ○ 10,000 tweets in one month
- 24. for Special Collections ● new type of record/collection ● enhance existing collections
- 25. and beyond... “content on social media is likely a federal record” - NARA NARA Bulletin 2012-02: Guidance on Managing Social Media Records. October 25, 2013. http://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/bulletins/2014/2014-02.html
- 27. Social Feed Manager (“SFM”) the software
- 28. the software django/python django-social-auth tweepy github.com/gwu-libraries/social-feed-manager open source, MIT-style license
- 33. technical topics ● how deep must we go? ● other sources ● media and web capture ● search / analysis ● managing processes and data flow ● import / export / delivery ● app packaging
- 34. next steps ● improve SFM to meet diverse research, teaching, collection development needs ● meeting at GW Libraries this week ● a robust, reliable, implemented, tested, and documented application ● looking for collaborators