Jeremy, Liz, Mike, and Kathie, Thank you very much! I'm just going to plot out an action plan based on everyone's advice and tips. There are a few questions embedded as I think through this process. PUBLIC or PRIVATE? 1) figure out if my tweeter feed is now public (I changed it only yesterday). Can someone of you find me? @stephjoke 2) [prepare to] create an alternative account to use if necessary HASHTAG: I like Jeremy's suggestion because it sets up tracking by year if we get to do this again. Following Liz' advice, I went to http://www.whatthetrend.com and searched: #team_science_10 is unique, the search generates lots of 'related tweets' and 'related news' that are far afield from the conference's use of "team science." I wondered about skipping the underscores and discovered that #teamscience alone turns up only a few 'related tweets but a good range of related news all of which is in the same content ballpark as this conference (useful contextual material?), but we dont want to be confused, so what about a compromise #teamscience_10 (I think we have a winner!) TRACKING: Options. A) Create a list inside Twitter? (They have a button that I fooled with, but it is different than mashables site.) Mike, I did (try to) set up a list, but this will aggregate all tweets of all kinds from whoever is on the list, right? This isnt necessarily undesirable if folks are spending lots of time chatting with friends or doing work unrelated to the conference, that is useful info about the conference dynamics, especially if there are bursts or waves, any kind of pattern we can link with events in real time) B) Kathie, are TweetDeck or Tweetie different tools that I would use in addition (preliminary) to Twapperkeeper? Kathie, I am going to peek at your and Liza Potts examples! Thank you again! Best regards, steph
Stephanie,
I searched your hashtag on hashtag.org and it shows that 4 tweets were made on or around April 10 with that hashtag. My first suggestion would be to try a third party application like TweetDeck or Tweetie to gather the hastag's tweets into one place. The Twitter interface is not all that friendly for trying to follow a hashtag conversation.
The only way to keep a tweet stream within a specific group (at least that I know of) is for the user twitter accounts to all be private and then all the users have to follow each other. This can be difficult to set up, especially at a conference. Your hashtag seems to be going in the right direction; according to hashtag.org it doesn't appear to be being used by others (i.e., only 4 tweets) and it's nice and short. I would recommend against the longer 'bringthesocial' since that will use up valuable Tweet real estate (the hashtag counts as part of the 140 characters).
If you'd like to see how a public tweet stream plays out, you're welcome to look at some of the ones my colleague, Liza Potts, and I use with our classes and lab RAs. The hashtags for those are: #ceme, #nmtp, #ia10. We've occasionally had problems with strangers straggling into the conversation and have sometimes had the happy circumstance of having scholars show up for the discussion when we're talking about their work.
Also, some of your problems may have to do with your recent switch from private to public as Liz pointed out, but it could also be a problem with Twitter. Twitter has a fairly persistent problem where some accounts get "stuck" on private mode. This has happened to myself and several students in my classes. It takes a lot of perseverance and usually the stocking of several Twitter programers/employees for several months to have an account cleared. Many of us have had to end up creating a new account while we wait, while others have had some luck getting it unstuck by changing account passwords.
One other thing I'd suggest, if you want to keep the tweets generated at your conference, you should go to twapperkeeper.com and set up an archive. This tool will capture and archive all tweets with the hashtag you register there so that you can go back later and re-read them (Twitter stores posts for either 7 or 14 days, I can't remember which). Creating an archive at Twapperkeeper allows you to store them indefinitely.
Hope this helps, Kathie
_______________________________ Kathie Gossett, PhD Asst. Professor of Writing, Rhetoric & New Media Co-Director, CeME Lab Department of English Old Dominion University
(757) 683-5818 kgossett@odu.edu www.kathiegossett.com ceme.digitalodu.com
On Apr 15, 2010, at 8:56 PM, Stephanie Jo Kent wrote:
Hi all,
I have been a quasi-lurker for @6 years. I have interacted with a few of you (thanks!). Some day I imagine I'll have something substantive to contribute; to date my attempts have been diverted into other directions.
Next week, a colleague and I will conduct an action research project at a conference, "The Science of Team Science." We will invite conference participants to tweet thoughts, observations, commentary, jokes, etc during the conference, in order to build a supplementary database for the authorized task of our poster session.
Any suggestions on how to set this up so that the stream remains relatively 'clean'? There is probably a technical term, but what I mean is boundaried - as much as possible - to the participants of the conference. I created the hashtag #socialSTS as a test. At the moment, it does not come up in search, not even advanced search....and it is close to 'socialist' which might be a problem(?). I am supposing that if/when the number of relevant tweets increases then the twitter search engine will find them, am I correct? Or, is the scale so small (<200 people, with who knows what percentage actually participating) that I need to set up some actual architecture? (I'll be thrilled if even a few percent contribute, since this is so experimental.)
Maybe bringthesocial is a better hashtag, and closer to the name of our poster/project.
I've kept my own tweets private until today (I've hardly been a user at all). I thought I ought to make them public for this project? If the idea catches on, for instance, there may be people who wished they could attend the conference but couldn't.... and who might want to participate vicariously...? (Yes, call me a dreamer, grin.)
I'm sure there is a range of implications I've yet to consider. If anyone knows of similar projects, or has ideas about implementing this one, I'll be grateful for the opportunity to hash this through. (Pun intended - which is not usually my style!)
thanks very much, steph
-- Stephanie Jo Kent
Weblog: http://www.reflexivity.us email: stephanie.kent@fulbrightmail.org mobile: 1 (413) 824-9663
Fulbright Fellow to the European Institutions, 2008-2009 Doctoral Candidate, Communication, University of Massachusetts Amherst USA Master of Education, Social Justice Education Certified American Sign Language/English Interpreter
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