The Digital Humanities 2016 conference is taking/took place in Kraków,
Poland, between Sunday 11 July and Saturday 16 July 2016. #DH2016 is/was
the conference official hashtag.
What This Output Is
This
is a CSV file containing a total
of 3717 Tweets publicly published with the hashtag #DH2016 on Thursday 14 July 2016 GMT.
The
archive starts with a Tweet published on Thursday July 14 2016 at 00:01:04 +0000 and ends with a Tweet published on Thursday July 14 2016 at 23:49:14 +0000 (GMT).
Previous days have been shared on a different output. A breakdown of Tweets per day so far:
Sunday 10 July 2016: 179 Tweets Monday 11 July 2016: 981 Tweets Tuesday 12 July 2016: 2318 Tweets Wednesday 13 July 2016: 4175 Tweets Thursday 14 July 2016: 3717 Tweets
Methodology and Limitations
The Tweets contained in this file were collected by Ernesto Priego using Martin Hawksey's TAGS 6.0.
Only
users with at least 1 follower were included in the archive. Retweets
have been included (Retweets count as Tweets). The collection
spreadsheet was customised to reflect the time zone and geographical
location of the conference.
The profile_image_url and entities_str metadata were removed before public sharing in this archive.
Please
bear in mind that the conference hashtag has been spammed so some
Tweets colllected may be from spam accounts. Some automated refining has
been performed to remove Tweets not related to the conference but the
data is likely to require further refining and deduplication.
Both
research and experience show that the Twitter search API is not 100%
reliable. Large Tweet volumes affect the search collection process. The
API might "over-represent the more central users", not offering "an
accurate picture of peripheral activity" (Gonzalez-Bailon, Sandra, et
al. 2012).
Apart from the filters and limitations already declared, it cannot be guaranteed that this file contains each and every
Tweet tagged with #dh2016 during the indicated period, and the dataset is shared for
archival, comparative and indicative educational research purposes only.
Only
content from public accounts is included and was obtained from the
Twitter Search API. The shared data is also publicly available to all
Twitter users via the Twitter Search API and available to anyone with an
Internet connection via the Twitter and Twitter Search web client and
mobile apps without the need of a Twitter account.
Each Tweet and
its contents were published openly on the Web with the queried hashtag
and are responsibility of the original authors. Original Tweets are
likely to be copyright their individual authors but please check
individually.
No private
personal information is shared in this dataset. The collection and
sharing of this dataset is enabled and allowed by Twitter's Privacy
Policy. The sharing of this dataset complies with Twitter's Developer
Rules of the Road.
This dataset is shared to archive, document and encourage open educational research into scholarly activity on Twitter.
Other Considerations
Tweets
published publicly by scholars during academic conferences are often
tagged (labeled) with a hashtag dedicated to the conference in question.
The
purpose and function of hashtags is to organise and describe
information/outputs under the relevant label in order to enhance the
discoverability of the labeled information/outputs (Tweets in this
case).
A hashtag is metadata users choose freely to use so their
content is associated, directly linked to and categorised with the
chosen hashtag.
Though every reason for Tweeters' use of
hashtags cannot be generalised nor predicted, it can be argued that
scholarly Twitter users form specialised, self-selecting public
professional networks that tend to observe scholarly practices and
accepted modes of social and professional behaviour.
In general
terms it can be argued that scholarly Twitter users willingly and
consciously tag their public Tweets with a conference hashtag as a means
to network and to promote, report from, reflect on, comment on and
generally contribute publicly to the scholarly conversation around
conferences. As Twitter users, conference Twitter hashtag contributors
have agreed to Twitter's Privacy and data sharing policies.
Professional
associations like the Modern Language Association recognise Tweets as
citeable scholarly outputs. Archiving scholarly Tweets is a means to
preserve this form of rapid online scholarship that otherwise can very
likely become unretrievable as time passes; Twitter's search API has
well-known temporal limitations for retrospective historical search and
collection.
Beyond individual tweets as scholarly outputs, the
collective scholarly activity on Twitter around a conference or academic
project or event can provide interesting insights for the contemporary
history of scholarly communications. To date, collecting in real time is
the only relatively accurate method to archive tweets at a small scale.
Though these datasets have limitations and are not thoroughly
systematic, it is hoped they can contribute to developing new insights
into the discipline's presence on Twitter over time.
The CC-BY license has been applied to the output in the repository as a
curated dataset. Authorial/curatorial/collection work has been
performed on the file in order to
make it available as part of the scholarly record. The data contained in
the deposited file is otherwise freely available elsewhere through
different methods and anyone not wishing to attribute the data to the
creator of this output is needless to say free to do their own
collection and clean their own data.