Category Archives: Session: Teach

Proposal for a session in which you offer to teach a skill, either a “hard” skill or a “soft” skill.

Session Proposal: Acquiring social media data

In this session, I will discuss options for acquiring social media data, including collecting it yourself, locating and re-using existing datasets, purchasing data, or using a social media service provider.

For collecting and re-using datasets, I will demonstrate Social Feed Manager and TweetSets. Social Feed Manager is software that harvests social media data and web resources from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo. TweetSets supports creating custom Twitter datasets from existing datasets. Both are open-source software developed at George Washington University Libraries.

Depending on participant interest, additional topics for discussion might include research ethics and privacy considerations, collecting Facebook data, an introduction to APIs, comparing web archiving and API-based social media archiving, or anything else social media-related that participants would like to discuss.

Session Proposal: Intro to Scalar

I’ve taught many Omeka and WordPress workshops at THATCamps, and am happy to do so again if there’s interest. One thing I’ve taught less often but still a few times is Scalar, found at scalar.usc.edu,  which resembles Omeka and WordPress in that it’s a content management system that can be used to build a humanities-flavored website but differs from those systems in that it’s particularly good at allowing you to collect and feature content that already exists on the web from places like YouTube and the Internet Archive — other systems are designed more for you to upload original content. Scalar also describes its end products as *books,* and indeed it is more geared toward that model too than Omeka and WordPress are: it’s a good system for a multimedia web version of “longreads.”

One of my favorite Scalar projects is also the most simple: a book about American Bandstand called The Nicest Kids in Town at nicestkids.com/nehvectors/nicest-kids/index This site (or book) was created with the first version of Scalar. To see other examples of what can be done with Scalar, see scalar.usc.edu/scalar/showcase/