1. Saving Our Social Media
Julie C. Swierczek
tpverso.wordpress.com
This presentation is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International license.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Have fun!
32. Driscoll, Kevin, and Shawn Walker.
2014. “Working Within a Black Box:
Transparency in the Collection and
Production of Big Twitter Data.”
International Journal of
Communication 8: 1745-1764.
Before I begin, I want to mention that I am going to refer to several resources today. I will put them on my website, which is at tpverso.wordpress.com. …
Today I’m going to talk about preserving social media. …
This is not only – or not primarily – a technological problem. Some of what I will talk about today is more conceptual, but I think you will quickly see why the ideas I discuss are critical when we think about preserving social media. The big one is…
What sort of CONTEXT do we need to consider when preserving social media? What is a tweet without context? Tweets look like a cat stepped on the keyboard. Context is essential for them to make sense. It’s not just the context of the content, but also the context of WHAT, EXACTLY, A TWEET IS.
Understanding what a tweet is, and how that can be part of the context, is critical for understanding what it would mean to PRESERVE them. …
But first, a blanket apology to anyone in the room who works in archives or digital preservation. I am going to refer to …
Archiving social media. I will use ‘archive’ as a verb. It is pretty much inevitable when you talk about capturing content that is being created now. …
To the rest of you, let me just say that, in professional circles, it is a serious faux pas to use ‘archive’ as a verb. Stick that under your hat for future cocktail parties.
So, the first thing we may ask is …
Why save social media?
Since you are here, I’ll assume you have some ideas. For some of us, we have decided that social media is part of our …
…institutional records. As such, we may be required to capture them because of Harvard’s General Records Schedule, which tells archivists and records managers here what they are required to preserve and for how long.
Or, we may think that …
… social media is part of the fabric of society. If we don’t preserve them, historians of the future will be missing a key component of this era.
It would be like talking about the sixties without mentioning …
… psychedelics and hippies. Historians would be missing so much context if they didn’t know about cultural changes in that time.
Additionally, we may consider social media to be …
…history itself. There are many examples of this, but one of the most prominent ones is the …
… Arab Spring. …
…The press tossed around terms like “Facebook Revolution” and “Twitter Rebellion”…
… of course, that was an oversimplification of the situation, as it whitewashes the fact that tweets and posts didn’t rise up against governments. People did.
Lives were at stake, not just 140 characters and funny cat pictures. …
… Still, social media platforms were very important tools for these uprisings. To understand the Arab Spring, historians will need to understand these platforms and how information is spread across them. …
….They are going to have to make sense of social media in some way. It’s not merely a question of reading the tweets, posts, and so on. …
Additionally, these platforms are, in a way, our personal letters and papers. So we may be interested in preserving them as part of our personal digital archive. …
So, what do we mean when we say that we are going to *preserve* social media? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that…
Tweets are not like books. They are also not like…
… articles, papers, records, pamphlets, audio and video recordings, ephemera, calling cards, postcards, letters, notes… Most of the other things archivists deal with. Why is that? Well, if you have a letter, you can glean something from it, in most cases, without knowing much about the sender or recipient. The letter may be about planning cousin Edna’s wedding in 1952. Of course, you will get more from the letter if you have more context about the author, recipient, and so on. But even without that knowledge, it is very likely that the letter will make a certain amount of sense on its own. …
That is not always the case with tweets. In fact, I would claim that it is not *usually* the case that tweets make much sense by themselves. …
If you gather all of the tweets together, what does that get you?
Before I move on, let me note that I am talking about tweets here, but most of what I am saying will apply to other platforms. I will also talk about other platforms in more detail later.
One thing is for certain …
Keyword searching is not going to help. …
There is this wonderful article by Jeffrey Beall about all the ways that keyword searching fails. He talks about issues like synonyms, homonyms, and other language problems. For instance, if you are studying syphilis in the 19th century, you need to know that it was often called “French distemper”. Searching for syphilis might not bring many results.
As an aside: if you have not read this article, you should, especially if you are working on anything involving searching or natural language processing. It is awesome. Really, really dry – but AWESOME.
But there are other problems …
Hashtags are NOT like words. …
There are user-created abbreviations of words so that the tweet can be less than 140 characters. …
There are hashtags with no apparent meaning. …
There are hashtags that are used in a different way than the community of users first used them, or would normally use them. (I’ll say more on this later.)
But it’s not just hashtags that are weird. The text of social media itself can be bizarre. Let’s look at an example. …
I have no idea what is going on here. Is that first word a typo? Or did the user intend to leave off the “Y”? By itself, what does this tweet mean?
We could perhaps glean some social relationships from the other mentioned users – but you can mention anyone in a tweet, so we can’t even assume that! …
We could save ALL THE TWEETS, but that wouldn’t necessarily mean we would be saving CONTENT.
Also, I’m not sure we can save all the tweets anyway. …
An interesting, but rarely discussed problem, is that the different aggregation methods for tweets – whether through Twitter’s Streaming API or Search API, or through a third-party Big Data service that is astronomically expensive – produce different results. One study in 2012 found that, for their topic, the Twitter’s Streaming API returned more than FOUR times as many tweets as the Search API. …
So, we have a problem with technology and information loss. We regularly hear people saying, “There is too much information! We can’t cope! The sky is falling!” I agree. …
I haven’t read this yet, but Abby Smith Rumsey just published “When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future.” She talks about the problem of trying to preserve bits, which is like throwing our data into a digital black hole. We’ve heard that before. But what I find interesting is that she puts this in the context of how humans have dealt with information overload over the centuries. …
People are terribly complacent about the persistence of information. …
This extends beyond social media. We hear about people who lose all of their files because of a problem with Dropbox. Or Flickr. Even Gmail has suffered data loss. …
…No one wants to spend time with our dear friend EULA. If you are using a free service, most EULAs provide absolutely no guarantee that your data will be safe. …
… There are also clauses that prevent users from trying to collect any damages from the service providers in such cases.
Besides, it looks like we are getting a free service for storing and transmitting data, but the truth is if you are not paying for something, that’s because …
… YOU are the product.
These companies aren’t interested in preserving your data. They are interested in you as a piece of data. …
… So, when I hear about people who have “all of their photos” in Flickr, or Facebook, or Instagram, I just want to cry. We have to stop pretending that these services will exist in the future. …
… I mention this problem with the persistence of data because we are going to be faced with a future where historians and social scientists not only have to deal with the incredibly complex social media platforms, but also with the fact that big chunks of the content may be missing. …
… Think about it. Social media is somewhat unique in that users can go back and delete their content, so much of it disappears. …
… We didn’t see much of that with newspaper publishing, or pamphlets and bills. Once something was published to the masses, it was hard to delete it from the world. This makes capturing social media a particularly …
...urgent problem. I think this is especially the case because many of the posts and tweets related to political upheaval will be removed by the users for their own safety, since they live in repressive regimes where there could be dire consequences if the rulers decide to go after them for making these posts.
This puts a whole other spin on saving social media. It’s not just about your Instagram pictures of your picnic in the park. There is so much more happening on these platforms, and I think we lose sight of that because we do not live in a repressive regime. …
So. Even if we could beat the clock and save ‘all the tweets’, what would that mean? What benefit would there be? In order to think about this …
Let’s look at a preservation challenge we already know. …
My family can identify three people here, and none of them are the bride or groom. …
We can identify a few more in this photo. What’s missing here? …
Labels. Why? Probably for the simple reason that in early photography, photos were a rare and special thing, and everyone knew who was in the photo, so what would be the point of writing down their names? If a photograph was passed on to someone, the information about the photo would be passed on verbally at that time. …
It takes nothing more advanced than the technology of the pen to write down the names of people in a photo. …
In a way, the photos are still valuable. They might be able to tell us something about wedding practices, culture, and the like. But if I saved them because they are part of my family history, well, too bad. I’ve got nothing there. …
Compare that to this tweet.
I just have NO IDEA what is going on here. …
In order to think about ways we can deal with this, we need to think about…
FORMS. That is, the social and technological forms of these platforms. TECHNOLOGICAL FORMS include …
…features and restrictions of the platform. These may include: …
Character limits. Interestingly, Twitter just changed its platform so that the 140-count character limit does not include URLs! We can put more content in our tweets! Yay! …
There are also types of permissible content – for example, the ability to add images but not audio…
…or other built-in requirements for content, like the ability to use only plain text and not italics, bold, bold and underlining. …
You can’t italicize your Facebook status, for instance. …
Not to mention the different ways of promoting a post. There is the Google “plus one”, the Twitter “heart”, which used to be a “star”, …
… and the Facebook “like” button. Facebook provides us with a great example of why understanding the technological platform is important. …
In the beginning of 2016, Facebook started rolling out “Reactions”. So, instead of using the thumbs-up “like” button for everything, we now have some other choices. This is a perfect examples of why understanding the technological form will be so important in the future. …
Before these new “reactions” were rolled out, if you put up a sad post, all I could do was “like” it. For a while, people would “like” the post and then write a comment to apologize for using the “like” button on it, emphasizing that it was meant as a show of support.
Later, people stopped adding the apologies. …
Now, I just “like” the fact that your dog died. …
So, fifty years from now, when a researcher looks at that post, she’ll see that I “liked” the fact that your dog died. Other posts on the loss of a pet from a few months later show the sad face. So why did I use the ‘like’ button instead? …
Are pre-2016 Facebook users going to look like a bunch of barbarians to researchers of the future?
We need to track these changes so that researchers can grasp what we were doing. …
Another example: Initially, Facebook displayed posts in reverse chronological order. …
If you posted about your graduation day, and then someone else posted …
…a funny cat picture on your wall, then the cat picture would appear at the top of your posts. People could miss your graduation post because it was pushed further down the page. …
Later, Facebook introduced “Timeline”, which allows us to post events out of order. It also marks those posts as being significant in a way that gives priority to them over other posts.
This is pretty interesting when you compare it to physical scrapbooks. …
Tamar Katriel and Thomas Farrell have this great article where they talk about the ways that creators handle their physical scrapbooks. Most creators would not hand a scrapbook over to someone else to let them READ it. Instead, the most common practice is the for the creator to sit next to the reader and explain the scrapbook as they browse it. …
Facebook takes the form of the scrapbook – capturing clippings and making records of significant events – and puts a spin on it with Timeline. In Facebook – unlike with MySpace – users have no real control over the style of the platform. (Compare that to the way that contemporary scrapbook creators go all out to impart meaning and beauty in a scrapbook page.) …
Facebook’s form takes away our ability to be self-expressive with the PLATFORM, but it also makes it possible for readers to ‘read’ each other’s pages without the need for interpretation. This demonstrates how the technological form of the Facebook Timeline has an effect on the social aspect of use – we can ‘read’ each other’s Facebook ‘scrapbook’ without help. …
Another, slightly more troubling technological element of social media platforms is the …
… sorting algorithm.
(This is a Rockhopper penguin, by the way.) …
As I mentioned before, Facebook used to show posts in reverse chronological order. But there are way too many posts now, so it is not feasible for users to read all posts. So, Facebook decides what to show you based on your past behavior. If you usually click on Alice’s posts, you will see more content from Alice in the future.
This is now in effect for Twitter and Instagram. …
This is a problem, for our purposes, since the sorting algorithm is a black box. Think again of the researchers of the future. Why aren’t any people in this group participating in that other group? Were they being deliberately exclusionary? Or, did they just not see that other group because of the filter bubble?
Again, this context is going to be important, and most methods of preserving social media aren’t looking at this aspect of it. …
Also, to put on my tinfoil hat for a moment here, the reason Facebook gave us reaction buttons is NOT to help us react to each other’s posts in a more meaningful way. Rather, it is so that they can gather even more information about our preferences so that they can do a better job of marketing to their uses.
Remember, if you don’t pay for it, it’s because YOU are the product. …
Social form refers to forms that are not necessarily required by the platform. They often grow out of the practices of users.
Consider the hashtag. Twitter first launched in 2006, …
… and hashtags were NOT part of its technological form. …
The hashtag didn’t come into use until August 23, 2007, when Twitter user Chris Messina proposed using it to provide a way to bring together related messages about an event. Only later did it become part of the official technological form of Twitter. …
What I find interesting about the hashtag is that it was originally adopted as a way of bringing related tweets together. Now it has evolved to do many other things. …
#winning was Charlie Sheen’s hashtag when he claimed he was on top of the world…
…and he didn’t really LOOK like he was. (Apparently Sheen talked about how we was winning at life, but he was publicly falling apart.) So people use it like this: …
“Everyone has the motivation to look all nice this week and here I am coming to school with wet hair and sweatpants. #winning” …
So. Sarcasm. Only now, since that Sheen spectacle has passed, people are using it another way…
…when the tweet is about winning something. In this case, winning 52 Chick-fil-a sandwiches. …
This is why a simple hashtag glossary or dictionary won’t work. Also, hashtags are co-opted for unrelated purposes. …
I was recently at a conference where the conference hashtag must have been showing up on some trending graphs somewhere. Suddenly, we had many organizations jumping on our conference hashtag bandwagon to spread the word about their political agenda. … The really funny part is that I tried to find some of those tweets for this presentation. They were sent in early March. I can’t find them. I don’t know if that’s because of how Twitter is putting me in a filter bubble where it only shows me things it *thinks* I want to see, or if the tweets were removed. Also – I have no WAY of knowing. It’s a black box. (More on this later.) …
There’s also the way that hashtags are used for unrelated marketing. This is a Twitter account for a marketing company. We might look at this and think that someone at the company just watched the Oscars and likes Leonardo DiCaprio. However, this a marketing tweet. By including hashtags that were incredibly popular on the night of the Oscars, this tweet would show up in the feed for users following any of these tags. So, this is a case where a tweet looks like something – congratulations – but it’s really something else – a marketing ploy. ….
Hashtags have other uses, like making jokes…
or making a stage whisper, among others. So, we have taken a technological form and used it in a way that is not required by the form itself; it is something that the community of users has developed as a practice. We’ve invented language games that play with the platform. …
This is what linguist Ben Zimmer calls “ironic metadata”. …
This is not the first time we’ve made jokes by playing with technological form. As an example, in M*A*S*H*, when Hawkeye Pierce’s father is wrongly informed that Hawkeye is dead, Hawkeye sends him a telegram: Dear Dad, I am not dead. STOP. Hope you are the same. STOP. Thinking of selling my clubs? STOP. Spending my insurance money? STOP.
…
[Season 4, Episode 4: The Late Captain Pierce, October 3, 1975]
In addition to the technological form, we have social form. Since Facebook IS social, involving input from, and communication with, our friends, it is not only a place to record events and communicate. There is a performance aspect to…
identity presentation that is perhaps stronger than one would find in diaries or scrapbooks. In traditional diaries and scrapbooks, created by and mostly for, one person, the thought of other people viewing the content was pretty remote. In this social environment, my SELF is immediately read by others. My Timeline events may be just factual, since it’s a fill-in-the-blank approach, but my wall posts can’t be too…
whiny or depressing. They have to be…
funny or at least interesting. I’ve known people to unfollow other users who are too…
sad or angry or otherwise not fun. Also, with many users, there seems to be a tacit agreement that Facebook posts should be…
ironic and cynical. David Foster Wallace said irony and cynicism are seen as a measure of…
hip sophistication and literary savvy. …
[Wallace, David Foster, with Larry McCaffery, “An Expanded Interview with David Foster Wallace”, in Conversations with David Foster Wallace, edited by Stephen J. Burn. University Press of Mississippi, 2012, p. 48.]
He also says that irony has gone from liberating to enslaving.
This is why I get fed up with seemingly competitive crafting of Facebook posts about once a year and delete my account.
How will researchers of the future know that they are reading irony and sarcasm and cynicism? Think about how badly that kind of humor can fail in email. When faced with this data, what will they be able to understand?
There are also communities of practice that have grown on social media platforms. …
There have been several articles recently about people finding support for recovery from eating disorders on Instagram. …
I found myself in the land of big salads. …
And what some participants lovingly call “decorated mush”. (Usually oatmeal or smoothies in a bowl.) Users post these photos of their healthy, vibrant meals to show their community that they are now developing a different relationship with food. …
There are dozens of hashtags associated with these images. Some of them are cryptic. …
Instagram introduced new guidelines against self-harm images and accounts in April 2012. Certain hashtags that promote eating disorders were disabled. …
This doesn’t stop users from posting content that promotes eating disorders. Users just change their hashtags. They add letters, or substitute numbers for letters, to make alternative hashtags. …
You need to know the hashtags to know if this is a picture of a recovery meal or not. It’s not. This is a picture of a meal with a hashtag that is in favor of anorexia. …
This poses yet another challenge to researchers of the future. Not only will they have salads and decorated mush to explore, but they’ll have to comprehend the hashtags – some of which are acronyms and therefore difficult to unpack – to understand what they are seeing. …
Understanding the platform will only get us so far, as these social forms also need to be understood to make sense of social media. …
There are so many more examples like these. Early on, Facebook had a character limit too. It was increased over time. If a researcher doesn’t know that, she could conclude that people first used Facebook for brief messages, but that grew over time to longer posts. That’s only part of the story. The reason the posts grew over time is because the character limit increased. Early messages were brief because users had no choice to make them longer. …
So, what do we do?
We need to figure out ways to capture context.
This could be as simple as providing a readme file to explain context for your social media. …
I would like to see articles about changes to platforms and to social practices on them. Right now, we only get click-bait articles that are written to grab your attention, but the information is either presented in hyperbole or it is just plain wrong. It would be better if we could get a more balanced view of the changes. There should be scholarly articles tracing the changes to the technological and social forms over time. This could span information science, social science, software studies – all manner of disciplines. …
It would be best if we could get the platforms themselves to record changes over time, but they probably want to guard those secrets – especially their sorting algorithms. …
Twitter has promised to turn all of its public tweets over to the Library of Congress. What if we could get them to turn over their technical information as well, to be held in trust for the future?
Other approaches might include providing a way to annotate content so we could say, for example, that these Facebook posts were during the “Like button” era, and these later ones were after the reaction buttons were introduced. …
There could also be personal notation to say things like, this was the time where I participated in a group that posted pictures of food on Instagram with these tags. …
So, these are some issues we must consider moving forward.
In digital asset management, there is a saying that if you don’t know the rights for an asset, it’s not an asset …
it’s a liability. You are paying to store something that you may not ever be able to reuse because you don’t have the rights or permissions to do so.
Similarly, if we capture social media without also capturing something of the technological and social forms, have we captured anything?
If a tweet is buried in a forest and no one reads it for a hundred years, does it make any sense? …
So, preserving social media is not just about capturing *stuff*. It’s about capturing information that is meaningful. ..
One way we can do this now is simply to group our content together in whatever meaningful way that we can. …
One way that provides a lot of avenues for capturing meaning is to look at event-based collections. The Archive-It web archiving service has worked with a number of institutions to create web and social media archives of events. This one here is the landing page for their collections covering what we might call the Arab Spring, in North Africa and the Middle East from 2011-2013. We could develop tools to put social media on a timeline next to related news media to help provide some of the social context that may be lost if the social media was just looked at on its own. …
[demo of resources; see handout]
So, here are some thoughts so far on the tools available. It would be relatively trivial to download images from services that don’t provide them. …
I think that, for now, a multi-pronged approach is best. Use something like Zapier or IFTTT or TAGS to capture some data into a spreadsheet. Use something like digi.me to capture the images. That way, you will have data in both forms if something better comes along in the future. …
If you use Archive-It or another web archiving service, that might work for your needs. …
But there is still so much more to do. One of the glaring omissions in the methods so far is that they don’t do anything to capture the INTERACTION – the actual social part – of the information stream. …
Also, social interaction continues to change the information stream over time. People reply to your posts, liking them, retweeting them, and so on. The methods I’ve described here don’t really do anything to preserve those aspects. …
We have a long way to go. But I want to leave you with something that Lori Kendall [University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign] said at the Personal Digital Archiving conference in 2015. When deciding what to capture and how, she said we should ask ourselves …
“What stories do we want to tell?” I think it may be useful to consider tweets and other posts more like parts of a story than like discrete objects we can catalog and search in a database. So, to decide what to capture and how to capture it, we need to ask ourselves what stories we want to tell. Then we can build tools for capture.
