Poster submitted to the Digital Literacies Conference, held at the University of Southampton, June 2012 (http://www.diglit.soton.ac.uk/conference/programme/). The SMiLE project took place during the CAA conference (http://caaconference.org/caa2012/).

1. SMiLE Project Project Description
The Social Media in Live Events (SMiLE) project aims to improve
understanding around the possibilities for the use of social media for
Social Media in Live Events 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
Team Members needs, such as networking, resource discovery, and administration.
The SMiLE team is made up of the following: The ultimate goal of the project is to produce a freely available
handbook for organisations planning live events, with supporting
 Nicole Beale
resources for on-going research in this area.
 Tom Brughmans


Dr. Graeme Earl
Dr. Lisa Harris
Case Study
 Ivan Melendez The SMiLE project was launched as part of the Computer Applications
 Chris Phethean in Archaeology (CAA2012) conference in March 2012. The CAA
 Ring Xu conference is an international event for archaeologists from
One of the SUSUtv videos produced during the event,
shared with virtual delegates through Vimeo. commercial and academic institutions, supported by the CAA
With special thanks also to the CAA2012 SMiLE organisation. SMiLE project case study website:
volunteers, SUSUtv, & Mark Borkum. www.caaconference.org/caa2012
Social Media Archive
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.
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.
Provisional Findings Future Plans
During the conference, the SMiLE project The project will now investigate the possibilities for future uses of the CAA archive,
tested how far social media tools could be as well as analysing the data that has been collected.
used at live events to support a variety of
The team plans to create visualisations of
themes, including the following:
the archive that will provide alternative ways
 Pre-event exposure to explore the data, such as timeline based
 The community behind the event as a interfaces and interactive search applications.
global support network In particular, we will be investigating how the The SMiLE teamto support online challenges. Such as the using real
world activities
tested the use of social media platforms,
 Exploring the relationship between key use of social media post-event can facilitate crowdsourced CAA personal histories corkboards pictured above.
topics being covered by the event discussion around new research, and in building ties between institutions and
 Celebrating the history and future of the individuals working in the area of computational archaeology.
event and its network
SMiLE aims also to develop a code of conduct for the ethical collection, curation
 The importance of the network for
and archiving of social media data with Oxford e-Research Centre.
students
 The community’s use of social media
beyond the event
 Practical organisation of the event Join the SMiLE Team
 Supporting virtually attending delegates We are looking for people to get involved in the next stage of the project;
 Post-event dissemination of resources analysing the CAA2012 archive.
and strengthening of network
 Formative and summative feedback for For example, the image here shows how,
improving future events. with the data from Twitter, social network
analysis can help us to understand the way
that the CAA network shares information. 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
Please contact us if you’d like to get involved! are other closely connected, related conversations going on.
During the CAA conference, many social media platforms were used to disseminate
resources beyond the conference, to the wider community.
Nicole Beale email: nicoleebeale@gmail.com twitter: @nicoleebeale
Dr. Lisa Harris email: l.j.harris@soton.ac.uk twitter: @lisaharris