Session II: Methods and Tools for Building Collections of Social Media
**Instructors: **Ed Summers (MITH) Porter Olsen (MITH) Laura Wrubel (GWU) In this 90 minute workshop we will introduce and lead a hands on demonstration of tools for collecting data from Twitter, such as the Ferguson collection mentioned above. We will briefly discuss the types of considerations that go into deciding what tools or services to use. The majority of the time will be spent creating your own collections of data using one of four tools: TAGS, IFTTT, Social Feed Manager and twarc. This is a hands on workshop, so please bring a laptop and ideas about the Twitter data you would like to collect. Also, if you are interested in using twarc, please install it prior to attending the workshop (installation details will be provided).
Speakers
Ed is a researcher and software developer working at the intersection of information technology and memory studies. His work is informed by a sociotechnical approach which emphasizes the role that communities of practice play in the development of infrastructure for libraries and archives, with a particular focus on web archives and social media. He has worked for the last two decades in academia, government and business. Prior to joining MITH Ed helped build the Repository Development Center (RDC) at the Library of Congress. There he led the design and implementation of the NEH funded National Digital Newspaper Program’s web application Chronicling America. Ed designed digital curation services for social media archiving and image quality analysis. He also served as a member of the W3C Semantic Web Deployment Group where he helped standardize SKOS, and implemented the initial version of LC’s Linked Data service.
Porter Olsen currently serves as a research faculty member at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) where he is the Community Lead on the BitCurator project, a Mellon funded project to bring digital forensics tools and techniques to collecting institutions working with born-digital material. Simultaneously, he is a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department at the University of Maryland studying digital humanities and postcolonial literature. His dissertation, titled “Hacking the Empire: Reading the Digital in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century Postcolonial Literature,” studies hacker culture in the global south and how the hacker ethos is represented in later 20th and early 21st century postcolonial fiction under the direction of Dr. Matthew Kirschenbaum. Porter teaches classes on electronic literature and globalization and has been recognized for his contributions to the growing online teaching program in the university’s English department. Before returning to graduate school, Porter worked as product manager on the United Linux initiative, an effort to create a single Linux platform shared among distributors from Germany, Brazil, the U.S., and Japan.
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