Show & Tell | 12. May 2023

Emergency Archiving – Telegram Archive of the War (Show & Tell VII)

Lecture and discussion series "Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice" (online)

Summer Semester Focus: 'Archiving Efforts' – Securing and Long-Term Archiving of Social Media Data

The working group 'Social Media Data', an initiative of NFDI4Culture together with BERD@NFDI, KonsortSWD and Text+ within the framework of the National Research Data Infrastructure, has been organising the lecture and discussion series "Show & Tell – Social Media Data in Research Practice" since the beginning of 2022.

This summer semester we want to deal specifically with archiving and shed light on some specific problems: the time-critical collection and long-term archiving of text and image data from social media and the systematic backup of dynamic and high-frequency content from distributed platforms and apps.

Taras Nazaruk (Center for Urban History, Lviv) will start the summer talks with a talk on "Emergency Archiving – Telegram Archive of the War" (Show & Tell VII) (slides):

Being in the state of war – among many other things – means scrolling updates constantly. Telegram has become an everyday go-to app for millions of Ukrainians since the full-scale invasion. The social media platform does not only reflect on current developments but also affects the warfare and wartime experiences directly. As captured and documented, it creates evidence, covering all areas from the battlefield to the everyday routine across Ukraine on either side of the frontline. How do we capture, assess and make accessible such flows for future research, considering the legal and ethical complexity of documenting social media? With no definitive methodological answers but as an emergency effort, the Center for Urban History launched this archiving initiative to preserve the social media practices of the war in Ukraine as well as to document how Ukrainians learn, live, and share testimonies through Telegram.

Further dates – tbc: Show & Tell VIII (26.05.) Britta Woldering & Claus-Michael Schlesinger (DNB & UB der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin): "Tweets archivieren in der DNB" and Show & Tell IX (23.06.) Katrin Weller (GESIS / CAIS): "Data Sharing in Social Media Research: Insights to Researchers' Practices and Challenges"

Please register here for the zoom room (on selected Fridays at 11:00 a.m. – preferably with an institutional address, the link will be sent shortly before):

https://nfdi4culture.de/go/social-media-data-show-tell

https://adwmainz.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwld-2qrjspHdOyIg3wjmEIRxYezQAVZ7Jm

The series is dedicated to tools in the field of social media research and wants to highlight best practices of selected projects. In addition to pragmatic solutions and technical possibilities (interfaces, repositories, metadata standards, interoperability ...), the focus is also on ethical and legal challenges (e.g. personal rights and copyrights) in the sustainable, secure and critical handling of this data (code and data literacy, FAIR & CARE principles). Last but not least, we would like to invite you to discuss interdisciplinary research approaches and teaching methods that strain traditional and subject-specific frameworks and tools.

The first talks and discussions of the Show & Tell series took place in the summer term 2022 on 'Twitter Tools', 'Social Media Corpora' and 'Multimodal Data'. In autumn/winter 2022/23 we dealt with 'Reddit Data', 'Memes, Platform Data, and Computer Vision' as well as 'Social Bots' and their detection. The focus of the series was on interfaces and customized tools for collecting, linking and analysing. The aim was to exhaust APIs such as terms of use and to identify intersections between the participating consortia and data communities.

A cooperation series of

BERD@NFDI – Consortium for Business, Economic and Related Data

KonsortSWD – Consortium for the Social, Behavioral, Educational and Economic Sciences

NFDI4Culture – Consortium for research data of tangible and intangible cultural assets

Text+ – Consortium for text- and language-based research data

If you are interested in presenting and discussing your project, repository or research project (probably in the coming semesters), please contact us with a short proposal for a contribution (title, links and a short abstract of three to four lines).

coordination: christoph.eggersgluess (at) uni-marburg.de