Tuesday January 27, 2015 at 12:30pm

MITH Conference Room

0301 Hornbake Library North

A MITH Digital Humanities Incubator Roundtable Discussion of our ongoing work with Event-Based Social Media Data and Network Analysis

As many of you know, MITH has been spearheading a series of meetings to develop research and teaching opportunities for the use of the Ferguson Twitter archive, which is a collection of tweets harvested by MITH’s Ed Summers using a command line program named twarc in August 2014 in the wake of the Ferguson conflict.  MITH’s ongoing work with this collection has been conducted in collaboration with the ARHU Center for Synergy, and thus far has consisted of two brainstorming sessions with various UMD faculty and students, where we introduced the collection and asked for feedback on its possible value and use to the scholarly community.

As part of this work, which we are now calling ‘Researching Ferguson,’ MITH is excited to announce the first of several sessions continuing our exploration of this topic. This first session is a reconvening of our Ferguson constituency, comprising faculty and students who attended one of the two first sessions in October and December at MITH, or who expressed interest separately.

The discussions that took place at both prior events allowed us to synthesize your input and stated research interests in this topic, which we used to begin planning for several ongoing MITH Digital Humanities Incubator sessions that will occur throughout February 2015 as part of Black History Month, and possibly beyond.  These sessions will constitute MITH’s contribution to the University of Maryland teach-ins occurring throughout campus in Spring 2015.

In this first session on January 27th, MITH will begin by reviewing previous discussions and outcomes and then we will discuss our plans for the following future sessions, inviting further feedback from the group.  We also invite others who might be interested to join us.

Session II: Hands on demonstration of Tools for Collecting Social Media (Date TBD)

  •    Existing Off the Shelf Tools
  •    Command Line Tools
  •    DIY Tools

Session III: Ethics, Rights, Data Management (Date TBD)

  •    Storing and Managing Collected Data
  •    Sharing Data: Approaches and Legal Concerns

Session IV: Basic Navigation and Analysis of Your Data (Date TBD)

  •    Metadata: What is in a Tweet?
  •    Tools, Methods, Software for Working with JSON data

Session V: Advanced Analytical Techniques (Date TBD)

  •    Network Analysis
  •    Sentiment Analysis
  •    Event Detection

To RSVP, please complete this form.  If you have any questions, write us at mith@umd.edu.