AoIR Ethics Guidelines: DocSocData 2
A few weeks ago we held a community call to discuss documenting social media datasets, with a specific focus on Twitter. 25 people from around the world attended, who hailed from academic institutions, national libraries, digital preservation organizations, and social media data services.
After we all introduced ourselves we had an informal discussion about what we might want to do in the area of documenting social media data. Conversation ranged from specific collaborations to possible grant opportunities to support a face to fact meeting.
It was clear that many attendees were not only interested in the topic, but were already starting to do significant work, and that we would benefit from taking a deeper dive into some of the topic areas. Here is a short list of the topics that came up:
- Ethical Decision Making and Internet Research from the Association of Internet Researchers.
- Documenting student activism at the University of Virginia.
- Social media data ingest at German Social Science Infrastructure Services (GESIS).
- Twitter and Web Archiving at The National Library of New Zealand.
- Social Media Archive (SOMAR) at ICPSR and the University of Michigan.
- The emerging MeToo Archive at Harvard University.
- Digital Preservation Consortium guidance for social media data.
- Derived exports: additional metadata to deliver with datasets.
- Open Community Data Exchange
- Existing patterns for exploring and sharing Twitter in DiscoverText.
- Collections in Social Feed Manager.
- Using the W3C Data Catalog Vocabulary (DCAT) to share metadata on the web.
- LocalContexts labels for social media data.
- The DocNow Tweet ID Catalog.
As you can see it’s quite a list! We’ve scheduled our next call for August 22nd from 3–4 PM EDT. Nick Proferes has kindly offered to kick off these deeper dives by talking about the Association of Internet Researchers’ Ethics Guidelines. Nick will help us understand what the guidelines do and don’t provide, and we’ll have an informal discussion about how the guidelines could be useful when documenting Twitter datasets. If you would like to join please email edsu@umd.edu to be added to the call. Attendees from the previous call should automatically get an invite via email.
