Documenting Social Media Datasets #7: March 19, 10–11 AM ET
In order to collect data from social media platforms archivists and researchers are often required to agree to their Terms of Service (ToS). Sometimes just the mere act of visiting a platform in your browser implies consent to their terms. Among other things, ToS define how collected social media data can be used, who can use it, and for how long. As you can imagine these constraints are of great interest to archivists and other memory workers because of the ways that they impact the goals of cultural heritage organizations. ToS are also highly relevant for users of social media platforms because the terms shape the many ways that their content can be used and circulated.
Social media platforms’ ToS are usually written with the interests of the platform in mind, rather than the concerns of long term preservation, and collective memory. In addition, ToS are constantly changing to better align with evolving business strategies, and to respond to circumstances like the Facebook / Cambridge Analytica scandal. As such, ToS pose major challenges to archivists when they are actively engaged in documenting the context of social media data.
And so, for our next Documenting Social Media Datasets call we are excited to have Justin Littman joining us to talk about his work digesting the Twitter Terms of Service, which he wrote up recently in Twitter’s Developer Policies for Researchers, Archivists, and Librarians. It’s not required, but if you plan on joining us please give it a read over beforehand if you can.
Justin is currently working as a Digital Library Software Engineer at Stanford University, and previously worked at George Washington University (GWU) and the Library of Congress (LC). While at GWU Justin was instrumental in the development of the Social Feed Manager (SFM) opensource tool that allows researchers, faculty, students, and archivists to collect, manage, and export social media data from Twitter, Tumblr, Flickr, and Sina Weibo.
If you’d like to have the information on how to join the call please contact [email protected]. Or drop into our Slack channel. We hope you can join us!