Sustainable archiving of social media – Twitter and beyond

Social media is both a source of data for and the focus of a range of research approaches in the humanities, social sciences, IT, sciences and life sciences. The development of social media over time makes it a part of our digital cultural heritage, but the process for institutions to archive and document these in ways which fully reflect its detail and complexity is still only rudimentary. One key reason for this is the unique characteristics of the data in terms of media technology, economics, social factors and aesthetics. This confronts researchers, research institutions and cultural heritage institutions with many different challenges in terms of how to archive, catalogue and provide the data for later use. One example of this is Twitter (now known as “X”). The monetisation of the platform’s internal archive (part of ongoing restructuring of the platform) has had a radical impact on research and archiving. While flexible APIs and access opportunities before early 2023 led to a boom in research activity and the creation of comprehensive collections, access for research and archive has been made increasingly difficult since then.

Archiving, cataloguing and providing dynamic data from social media present challenges which affect researchers, research institutions, libraries and archives in equal measure, and the best way to solve these problems is through collaboration and partnership. This requires wide-ranging efforts which would be impossible for a single data community or discipline.

The aim of the conference is to facilitate networking between libraries, archives, research institutes and researchers in German-speaking countries who are involved in archiving and long-term use of data and digital objects from social media. Conference presentations will focus on the following topics:

• The interaction between research and archiving
• Research data problems in Tweet-based research caused by the loss of Twitter as a data provider
• The status and maintenance of social media from an archival and cultural-historical perspective, e.g. posts, interactions and platform elements
• The consolidation of collections, corpora, and holdings such as metadata
• Initiatives to encourage archiving and cataloguing of social media data
• Concepts for providing derivative datasets from social media and how these can be used
• Ethical questions
• Legal issues
• The possibility of creating a social media data registry

Conference

The conference will take place from 19 to 20 March 2024 in presence. The presentations will be streamed.

To the programme

On 21 and 22 March 2024, there will be a data sprint in which participants will work with a long-term corpus of German Twitter data. More

Organisation
Dr Britta Woldering, Letitia Mölck, German National Library
twarchiv@dnb.de

Programme Committee
Stefan Dietze (Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf, GESIS)
Dimitar Dimitrov (GESIS)
Christoph Eggersglüß (Philipps-Universität Marburg, NFDI4Culture)
Philippe Genêt (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek, Text+)
Tatjana Scheffler (Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
Claus-Michael Schlesinger (Universitätsbibliothek der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Britta Woldering (Deutsche Nationalbibliothek)

Cooperation partner
Deutsche Nationalbibliothek
BERD@NFDI
KDH UB HU Berlin
KonsortSWD
NFDI4Culture
NFDI4Data Science
NFDI4Memory
Text+

Information and contact

Venue: Lecture theatre, German National Library in Frankfurt am Main

Costs:

• Conference fee: 25,00 Euro
• For students: 15,00 Euro
• Participation via streaming: 5,00 Euro

Registration: Registration via Pretix

Registration deadline: 8 March 2024

After registering, you will receive an invoice for the conference fee by e-mail, which you should pay by 11 March 2024. After paying the conference fee, you will receive your registration confirmation by e-mail.

Cancellation policy

A refund of the conference fees paid is only possible in the event of cancellation up to and including 3 March 2024. In the event of cancellation at short notice after 3 March 2024 or postponement of the event by the German National Library, which is unavoidable due to circumstances beyond the control of the German National Library (force majeure or comparable circumstances such as national strikes by transport companies), no refund of conference fees is possible. A refund due to non-participation or prevention of participation is excluded, regardless of the reason.

Cloakroom info: Please leave your coats, jackets and umbrellas at the cloakroom. You will need two two-euro coins to lock bags and rucksacks in the lockers.

Accessibility: The rooms in which the event takes place are barrier-free.

Contact: twarchiv@dnb.de

Address and directions

German National Library
Adickesallee 1
60322 Frankfurt am Main