Welcome!
This site will include detailed instructions for setting up and using various social media archiving applications. Until that work is added, please see below for PDF, m4v, and keynote files of my Computers and Writing 2016 talk.
On the Decisions, Methods, and Visualizations of Social Media Archives
Scholarship informed by archived social media content (big data) has begun to appear in the pages of our journals. For example, Jones’s (2014) study of the #healthcare hashtag drew on 7,647 publicly available tweets “collected from the public archive at TwapperKeeper.com” (p. 9). In his study of geocaching in Instagram posts with the #31in31 hashtag, McNely (2015) created a custom feed that scraped over 4,000 Instagram posts into an archive hosted by DEVONthink. Wolff’s (2015) study of one Springsteen concert came from a corpus of over 2 million tweets archived using YourTwapperKeeper and the Twitter Archive Google Spreadsheet (TAGS). As the number of studies informed by large datasets continues to grow, so too do the number of archiving tools and applications that can visualize the data. Deciding which archiving technologies to use and how to present data can be complex, intimidating, and overwhelming in no small part because using them requires learning skills primarily associated with fields beyond our traditional disciplinary boundaries. In this talk, I demystify the technologies of archiving social media by introducing four archiving methods (YourTwapperKeeper, TAGS, NodeXL, and DMI-TCAT) and possibilities each afford for data analysis and visual presentation.