I strongly encourage the meetings. I have been talking, as a vendor with academic clients, to Gnip & Twitter for five years about academic use cases. There is general good will toward the spirit and intent of academic work at Twitter, but there are also longstanding misunderstandings and disagreements about how data is properly collected, stored, copied, shared, and reported under the Twitter Terms of Service ( https://twitter.com/tos?lang=en). Some key topics of interest: - Replication datasets (Availability via rehydration versus copies, the cost, and related rights issues) - Free versus premium data services (Who should pay? The researcher, chair, Dean, VP for Research, the library, NSF?) - Classroom and research fair use cases (scope of use/access to the data collected, secondary research cases) - Researcher responsibility with respect to deleted Tweets The last one is the hardest technical and practical issue, but it may be the most urgent if the "right to be forgotten" is going to be upheld in a meaningful manner in the context of Twitter data. Most researchers want to know how they can get, store, and analyze more and more Twitter data. No one has ever asked me how to purge Tweets that the author has deleted in the time since the data was collected. There is no easy way to do this currently, but there should be. There are other issues. For example, it is my understanding that academia is not considered an "industry" by Twitter, which I find unusual given the scope and size of the research enterprise. If Twitter does not think academia is an industry, then it must have some special status. Perhaps this special status could be clarified and libraries could start subscribing whole campuses to Twitter in much the same way they do LexisNexis. I would support moving Twitter data availability from the highly gifted/funded research teams and organizations to a more ubiquitous "data utility" status. There are haves and have nots in the academic Twitter data world. Further, Twitter sells premium data to academics at the same rate it does corporate customers. Is there not a case to be made for educational pricing? ~Stu On Fri, Jul 8, 2016 at 6:09 PM, Lonny J Avi Brooks <dr.brooks@gmail.com> wrote:
Sounds like a great opportunity to meet with these teams to gain a broader understanding of how Twitter works in general (i.e., how they do their job) and for accessing/using data for research purposes. Any chance to talk to industry teams enhances the dialogue. I'm in!
Thanks for sharing and providing this opportunity,
Lon Avi
On Thu, Jul 7, 2016 at 5:38 PM, Michelle, AoIR Association Coordinator < ac@aoir.org> wrote:
We are happy to announce that members of the Twitter Data Products and Trust & Safety teams will participate at AoIR 2016 and hold multiple office hours for AoIR members.
Many members of the AoIR community work with Twitter data in a variety of scenarios, from fandom to political communication. The Twitter Data Office Hours will be an opportunity for scholars to directly discuss research possibilities with Twitter, in order to identify opportunities to more effectively use Twitter data for research purposes. Twitter is also eager to get feedback from researchers working in this space about how to improve academic access to Twitter data.
The Twitter Data Office Hours will be held on site during the course of the conference. Starting today, you can contact twitterchat@aoir.org to book a half-hour slot. We suggest that you either prepare a brief proposal (~1 page) that outlines your project, or a set of questions that you would like to discuss.
Please keep in mind that the aim of the office hours is to facilitate concrete research projects by making it easier for scholars already working in this space to get access to Twitter data and share their feedback about Twitter’s APIs and Data Products. Please understand that the Twitter Data Office Hours are not intended as a technical introduction to digital research methods.
Hope to meet you all in Berlin,
Michelle _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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-- Avi
Kol Tov L'Hitraot (Be well, see you soon)
Lonny J Avi Brooks, PhD. Summer Chair 2016, Department of Communication Associate Professor in Strategic Communication
Lead Faculty for the *Long Term and Futures Thinking Project, the Long U*: www.longtermandfuturesthinking.org
Department of Communication California State University East Bay _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
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