Online activism is a frequently debated topic amongst journalists and researchers alike. What effect can a popular Twitter hashtag really have in achieving political or social change? Wasim Ahmed looks in depth at last year’s heavily tweeted #ThisIsACoup hashtag. While concrete outcomes may still be indeterminate, it is clear social media is now a rich space for activism, expressions of solidarity and […]
Category: Twitter
Using Vine to disseminate library information: a practical guide.
Vine is a Twitter app which allows short, looping videos to be created quickly and easily. There are a number of reasons for making videos and sharing. Antony Groves describes how the University of Sussex Library use Vine for teaching basic skills, promoting events, and advertising opening hours. Here he also provides a helpful five-step guide to creating and sharing a […]
Scientists across disciplines must get to a better agreement on social media metrics.
Kate Wing breaks down the criteria used for Science magazine’s list of Top Scientists on Twitter and finds the approach severely lacking. With a range of tools available for measuring social media impact, simplistic measures like follower number as a proxy of influence is outdated. But for all the flaws in Science’s approach, they have opened up a conversation about what should be […]
Publicly available data from Twitter is public evidence and does not necessarily constitute an “ethical dilemma”.
An article in Scientific American suggests further ethical considerations should be made for research derived from Twitter data. Ernesto Priego questions first the extent to which Twitter will actually release all of its valuable data and also argues archiving and disseminating information from Twitter and other public archives does not have to be cause for an “ethical dilemma” so long as […]
When Literature Professors’ Bots Read Collections of ROMS: An interview with Zach Whalen
How are researchers and scholars going to make use of born-digital primary sources? It’s an open question which many working in digital preservation are interested in. As part of the NDSA innovation working group’s ongoing Insights interview series I am excited to talk with Zach Whalen, an english professor at the University of Mary Washington, […]
Twitter and traditional bibliometrics are separate but complementary aspects of research impact.
In a recent study, Haustein and colleagues found a weak correlation between the number of times a paper is tweeted about and subsequent citations. But the study also found papers from 2012 were tweeted about ten times more than papers from … Continue reading →
Using Viewshare to Visualize Conference Tweets
This is a guest post from Camille Salas, the former Viewshare outreach librarian extraordinaire. Camille completed her internship and temporary assignment with the Library of Congress recently, we hope to again feature her outstanding work as a guest author on this blog once she’s landed a new gig. Best of luck, Camille! Following is an […]