Social Media in Live Events

Project Description

Provisional Findings

SMiLE Project

Social Media Archive

Join the SMiLE Team

The Social Media in Live Events (SMiLE) project aims to improve understanding around the possibilities for the use of social media for live events, by designing and testing methods for supporting, disseminating and archiving social media based interventions for events. Those interventions are designed to support various event needs, such as networking, resource discovery, and administration. The ultimate goal of the project is to produce a freely available handbook for organisations planning live events, with supporting resources for on-going research in this area.

The SMiLE project was launched as part of the Computer Applications in Archaeology (CAA2012) conference in March 2012. The CAA conference is an international event for archaeologists from commercial and academic institutions, supported by the CAA organisation. SMiLE project case study website: www.caaconference.org/caa2012

Case Study

Pre-event exposure The community behind the event as a

global support network Exploring the relationship between key

topics being covered by the event Celebrating the history and future of the

event and its network The importance of the network for

students The community’s use of social media

beyond the event Practical organisation of the event Supporting virtually attending delegates Post-event dissemination of resources

and strengthening of network Formative and summative feedback for

improving future events.

During the conference, the SMiLE project tested how far social media tools could be used at live events to support a variety of themes, including the following:

Nicole Beale email: nicoleebeale@gmail.com twitter: @nicoleebeale Dr. Lisa Harris email: l.j.harris@soton.ac.uk twitter: @lisaharris

The SMiLE project’s social media archive for the CAA conference case study is broad-ranging in its content and formats, and consequently curation of the files is complex. The Wordle to the right gives an idea of the kinds of content that the archive contains.

We are looking for people to get involved in the next stage of the project; analysing the CAA2012 archive.

For example, the image here shows how, with the data from Twitter, social network analysis can help us to understand the way that the CAA network shares information.

Please contact us if you’d like to get involved!

The SMiLE team tested the use of social media platforms, using real world activities to support online challenges. Such as the crowdsourced CAA personal histories corkboards pictured above.

During the CAA conference, many social media platforms were used to disseminate resources beyond the conference, to the wider community.

The project will now investigate the possibilities for future uses of the CAA archive, as well as analysing the data that has been collected.

The team plans to create visualisations of the archive that will provide alternative ways to explore the data, such as timeline based interfaces and interactive search applications. In particular, we will be investigating how the use of social media post-event can facilitate discussion around new research, and in building ties between institutions and individuals working in the area of computational archaeology.

SMiLE aims also to develop a code of conduct for the ethical collection, curation and archiving of social media data with Oxford e-Research Centre.

Future Plans

The team has been working over the past month to ensure that the archive can be kept for use by the CAA network, and plans to submit the archive to the Archaeological Data Service so that it is available online in the future. Much investigation has therefore taken place into record management issues surrounding aggregated content from social media platforms. We have also been looking at identifying the most appropriate methods for storage, analysis and dissemination of similar content.

Team Members The SMiLE team is made up of the following:

Nicole Beale Tom Brughmans Dr. Graeme Earl Dr. Lisa Harris Ivan Melendez Chris Phethean Ring Xu

With special thanks also to the CAA2012 SMiLE volunteers, SUSUtv, & Mark Borkum.

One of the SUSUtv videos produced during the event, shared with virtual delegates through Vimeo.

A small part of a network visualisation by Mark Borkum showing other hashtags occurring in #caasoton tweets. With the #caasoton tweets removed, the visualisation of the network shows that there are other closely connected, related conversations going on.