I will present a talk at Personal Digital Archiving 2012 titled “Arc-chiving: saving social links for study“.
The conference will be held on Thursday-Friday, February 23-24, 2012 at the Internet Archive in San Francisco.
News and updates on the conference will be posted at the conference web site, http://personalarchiving.com.
My talk this year will focus on collecting and analyzing connections between digital objects (like users) and the insights these tools make possible.
Abstract: While digital content is archived in various ways, the “arcs” or links among people and their digital objects are not systematically saved. Efforts to store social media often overlooks including data about collections of connections. The Social Media Research Foundation is dedicated to open tools, open data, and open scholarship related to social media. It is producing tools that can collect, analyze and upload social media data, including the arcs that link people and objects. Using the free and open NodeXL application, users can collect, analyze and visualize complex networks and then upload the data to a growing archive on the web at NodeXLGraphGallery.org. As the group of researchers grows, an archive is being assembled to provide researchers around the world with the data about social media needed to understand the ways computer mediated communication tools shape society.
My talk at the 2011 Personal Digital Archiving conference is available through the Internet Archive’s video service: