A summary of the Digital Research Video Project, part of the Social Media Knowledge Exchange (SMKE) and presented at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Cambridge on 2 July 2013 as part of the SMKE 2013 conference.

1. The Digital Research Video
Project
Suzanne Pilaar Birch
Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology
and the Ancient World
Brown University

2. The Theme
• Social Media & Activism
• Open Access and Accessibility
• Harvard call, NIH, and RCUK
• Personal Twitter use

3. Workshop
• Approximately 15 participants,
archaeology and non-archaeology
humanities split
• Led by professional research
communicator
• Academic vs. non-academic titles
• “Translating” abstracts
• Group storyboards
• Social media use and online profiles

4. Videos
• Competition (small)
• Last 3-4 minutes in
duration
• Participants wrote their
own script with editing
help (eliminating jargon!)
• Identified clearly as part
of a larger project out of
Cambridge (credibility)

5. Social Media Sharing and Online
Presence• Videos are available:
• www.smke.org and SMKE YouTube channel
• humbox.ac.uk
• Figshare.com
• Individual (Spry-Marques) & organization blogs
• Social media sharing
• Twitter and YouTube (analytics)
• Facebook (personal; no analytics).
• “Influential” and “highly influential” tweets
• Other media
• Announcements on appropriate academic email listservs
(discipline and department-based)
• Radio interview of Pia Spry-Marques in Madrid, Spain.
• University of Cambridge website (shared over 100 times
on Facebook and over 65 times via Twitter since 30 May)
• poster presentation at the 2013 Society for American
Archaeology

6. Response, anecdotal and analytics
• humbox.ac.uk: collectively had 44
hits and 14 downloads as of 30 May
• viewed in over 65 countries, with the
most views occurring in the US and
UK. Croatia (110), Serbia (12), and
Peru (9)
• Retweets added “I loved this!” or
“great project”
• Original tweets: “a SUPERB new
digital video on Ice Age [link] by the
lovely [handle] - for historians &
scientists” and “What Do Bones Say
About Beliefs?” [link] does a great
job in explaining the #taphonomy of
#humanbones”.
• Emails to researchers

7. Reflections on audience and impact
• Nature of the audience
• Who is the audience?
• Defining the “public”
• How far did we really reach?
• How can we reach better?
• Impact on…?
• Researchers felt it beneficial
• Echo chamber
• Translations

8. Conclusions and Further Directions
• Replicability: Canon scanner for
line drawings, SmoothDraw
(downloadable freeware) and
Adobe Premier Elements for
editing (free 30-day trial; 40GBP to
own)
• Sustainability: Videos posted on a
number of online websites
(YouTube) and publication in
Internet Archaeology means videos
will be placed in digital data
repository
• But-what about data surrounding
videos? Tweets? Analytics?
• Funding and time obstacle to the
creation of further videos