Basic prompt:
Curate the data from an activist hashtag.
You can use the #Ferguson data that UMD has been archiving, or find your own data to engage a different hashtag. The simplest version of this would be to use Storify to select tweets, images, and videos. However, I encourage you to use the resources you will learn about at MITH to develop a more extensive project.
This is an individual project, but if you have an idea that requires collaboration, I am open to being persuaded.
Project goals:
1. For you to become familiar with the different ways that social media, especially Twitter, is used for activist purposes – including the conflicts and contradictions that sometimes arise.
2. For you to think through the ways that the technical affordances of a medium and its social and political significance interact.
3. For you to build on the analytical and research skills you worked on in project 2, extending beyond your own social networks to a social media universe with which you may have less personal familiarity.
Project requirements:
Your project and/or reflection should engage with the following questions:
• The issue. What is the problem that the Twitter activism you are studying addresses?
• The people. Who originated this hashtag and who has been participating? How has it changed over time? This will probably require some digging around outside of Twitter itself.
• Conflict and change. What kinds of responses have there been to the hashtag? What arguments have arisen?
• The big picture. How is this hashtag describing, challenging, or reinforcing cultural operating systems of race, gender, class, or other power structures? How successful has it been in provoking discussion or encouraging change?
Practicalities
This project is not as open-ended as the last one, but you do have some choices about how to engage. The shape of your project will be determined by one major decision: do you want to track a hashtag of your own choice, or to work with UMD’s archive of #ferguson tweets? Here’s what your final project should look like:
• Include at least 40 tweets and other items (blog posts, videos, images and so on) organized in a meaningful order.
• Introduce, explain and analyze your choices in a total of 800-1000 words.
• If you want to curate your tweets and commentary in a timeline format, the web service Storify allows you to do this with web and social media sources. You may also embed Tweets, links, screenshots, quotations and so forth in a blog post. If you want to keep your work private or share it only with the class, choose the blog option, because Storify pages are public (meaning that everyone whose tweet you archive will be able to see your project).
• If you want to look at the different elements of tweets using a spreadsheet rather than a timeline format, you can use TAGS (the MITH workshop on April 1 will explain how to do this).• You’ll learn about the UMD #ferguson archive in our MITH session on April 1. It doesn’t have a user-friendly front end yet, but if you work with MITH to engage with the data in a more complex and labor-intensive way, you can present your work on the blog and write a reflection to explain it. Your reflection should be at least 400 words and may be longer.• No matter what you choose, remember that you are CURATING the hashtag data, as archivists and librarians do: you’re taking the chaos that is Twitter and giving it a meaningful shape that is specific to you. Your project should demonstrate something you have noticed, an argument you want to make, a thread you want to follow: you can use any focus so long as you use it as a starting point to think about the questions listed above.
Additional considerations: process and ethics
• Twitter is ephemeral. After a week or so has passed – less time for very active hashtags – you will no longer be able to find tweets by searching on twitter.com. The tweets are still there, they just don’t show up on search – so you will have to use your own Twitter account to archive them. If you retweet or favourite a tweet, it is saved in your own account and you will be able to refer back to it. Use this function as you explore and build your archive.
UPDATE 0401: Twitter just made it possible to search much further back in time! However, that doesn’t mean that tweets have stopped being ephemeral. They can be taken down or locked at any time – and Twitter search doesn’t show 100% of tweets, either.
• Twitter lacks context. As you explore, you will find yourself immersed in conversations you don’t understand, some of which will undoubtedly make you feel quite uncomfortable. You’ll need all your research skills to figure out what is going on: click on usernames to see previous discussions, click on tweets to see back-and-forth conversations, follow links to longer-form writing. Your goal is to develop the fullest possible understanding of what is going on.
• Twitter is made of people who haven’t signed up to teach a class. If you find yourself disagreeing or getting angry with the authors of the tweets that you are reading, that’s to be expected. But resist the temptation to try and argue people over to your point of view. While you’re working on this assignment, engage with Twitter purely through the Retweet or Favorite functions. Save your discussion for your assignment (bearing in mind that the choice to create a Storify project or a public blog post means you’re making something that will be visible to everyone you quote), and bring your questions and confusions to the classroom or to office hours. When you do engage in critical discussion in your project, make sure you’ve done everything you can to understand where the people you’re engaging are coming from.
Deadlines:
March 25: Poke around the world of activist Twitter and favorite 20 interesting tweets (The readings for class will give you some starting points; my Twitter account, @alothian, might be an good place to begin as well)
April 1: Keep exploring and favoriting/retweeting. Tweet your responses to the assignment for class (to spend at least an hour browsing #blacklivesmatter and related hashtags).
April 8: By email or Twitter, let me know what your project is going to focus on.
April 15: Class workshop. Bring the Tweets you are working with (on your computer) and be ready to explain the way you are planning to curate them.
April 17: Final projects due on blog.