Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

February 28, 2016

NCSU Offers Social Media Archives Toolkit for Libraries [Defeating Censors]

Filed under: Instagram,Library,Library software,Social Media,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 8:19 pm

NCSU Offers Social Media Archives Toolkit for Libraries by Matt Enis.

From the post:

North Carolina State University (NCSU) Libraries recently debuted a free, web-based social media archives toolkit designed to help cultural heritage organizations develop social media collection strategies, gain knowledge of ways in which peer institutions are collecting similar content, understand current and potential uses of social media content by researchers, assess the legal and ethical implications of archiving this content, and develop techniques for enriching collections of social media content at minimal cost. Tools for building and enriching collections include NCSU’s Social Media Combine—which pre-assembles the open source Social Feed Manager, developed at George Washington University for Twitter data harvesting, and NCSU’s own open source Lentil program for Instagram—into a single package that can be deployed on Windows, OSX, and Linux computers.

“By harvesting social media data (such as Tweets and Instagram photos), based on tags, accounts, or locations, researchers and cultural heritage professionals are able to develop accurate historical assessments and democratize access to archival contributors, who would otherwise never be represented in the historical record,” NCSU explained in an announcement.

“A lot of activity that used to take place as paper correspondence is now taking place on social media—the establishment of academic and artistic communities, political organizing, activism, awareness raising, personal and professional interactions,” Jason Casden, interim associate head of digital library initiatives, told LJ. Historians and researchers will want to have access to this correspondence, but unlike traditional letters, this content is extremely ephemeral and can’t be collected retroactively like traditional paper-based collections.

“So we collect proactively—as these events are happening or shortly after,” Casden explained.

I saw this too late today to install but I’m sure I will be posting about it later this week!

Do you see the potential of such tooling for defeating would-be censors of Twitter and other social media?

More on that later this week as well.

December 14, 2014

Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Search

Filed under: Facebook,Instagram,Social Media,Twitter — Patrick Durusau @ 7:07 pm

Everything You Need To Know About Social Media Search by Olsy Sorokina.

From the post:

For the past decade, social networks have been the most universally consistent way for us to document our lives. We travel, build relationships, accomplish new goals, discuss current events and welcome new lives—and all of these events can be traced on social media. We have created hashtags like #ThrowbackThursday and apps like Timehop to reminisce on all the past moments forever etched in the social web in form of status updates, photos, and 140-character phrases.

Major networks demonstrate their awareness of the role they play in their users’ lives by creating year-end summaries such as Facebook’s Year in Review, and Twitter’s #YearOnTwitter. However, much of the emphasis on social media has been traditionally placed on real-time interactions, which often made it difficult to browse for past posts without scrolling down for hours on end.

The bias towards real-time messaging has changed in a matter of a few days. Over the past month, three major social networks announced changes to their search functions, which made finding old posts as easy as a Google search. If you missed out on the news or need a refresher, here’s everything you need to know.

I suppose Olsy means in addition to search in general sucking.

Interested tidbit on Facebook:


This isn’t Facebook’s first attempt at building a search engine. The earlier version of Graph Search gave users search results in response to longer-form queries, such as “my friends who like Game of Thrones.” However, the semantic search never made it to the mobile platforms; many supposed that using complex phrases as search queries was too confusing for an average user.

Does anyone have any user research on the ability of users to use complex phrases as search queries?

I ask because if users have difficulty authoring “complex” semantics and difficulty querying with “complex” semantics, it stands to reason they may have difficulty interpreting “complex” semantic results. Yes?

If all three of those are the case, then how do we impart the value-add of “complex” semantics without tripping over one of those limitations?

Osly also covers Instagram and Twitter. Twitter’s advanced search looks like the standard include/exclude, etc. type of “advanced” search. “Advanced” maybe forty years ago in the early OPACs but not really “advanced” now.

Catch up on these new search features. They will provide at least a minimum of grist for your topic map mill.

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