Archiving Social Media Data – Challenges and Proposed Solutions

The CESSDA webinar “Archiving Social Media Data – Challenges and Proposed Solutions” brings together experts with experience in working with social media data to discuss practical, ethical, and legal challenges in archiving these data as well as ways to address those.

While much effort has gone into developing tools and methods for collecting and analyzing social media data, there still is considerable uncertainty regarding the archiving of these data. This webinar brings together experts from various institutions that have experience in working with social media data to discuss practical, ethical, and legal challenges.

The webinar is planned for 2 hours and will be divided into two parts. In the first part of the webinar, the invited experts will give short presentations of their current work related to the archiving of social media data. In these opening presentations, Libby Hemphill (ICPSR) will address ICPSR's efforts to enhance metadata for social media objects, integrating social media data into the restricted data ecosystem at ICPSR, and the changes to technical infrastructure that social media data require. Janez Štebe (Slovenian Social Sciences Data Archives) will discuss the application of FAIR indicators to social media archiving and provide an overview of existing cases of social media archiving from the SERISS project. Sara D. Thomson (University of Edinburgh) will focus on common challenges and potential shared solutions across different archive sectors to ethically preserving and sharing social media. Libby Bishop (GESIS) will present metadata challenges regarding social media data, and present draft recommendations of metadata elements and documentation developed from examples of ingesting such data at GESIS. Sebastian Karcher (Qualitative Data Repository) will discuss the distinct opportunities and challenges of archiving small-n social media data commonly used in qualitative social science research with a special focus on tools for archivists and researchers. Oliver Watteler (GESIS) will address the challenges presented by cases in which researchers have circumvented legal restrictions, like license agreements or usage contracts, in order to get to the data they need. The second part of the webinar will be a roundtable discussion with the engagement of the audience. The roundtable discussion will be structured by guiding questions from attendees as well as the webinar organizers (Johannes Breuer & Kerrin Borschewski from GESIS).
By the end of the webinar, attendees should have a better understanding of the key challenges associated with archiving social media as well as some specific solutions for addressing those in their work as researchers or archivists.

Date: Thursday, June 4th, 2020
Time: 3 pm- 5 pm CEST
Follow the link below to register for the webinar:
https://register.gotowebinar.com/register/8509094506000492816
See also:https://www.cessda.eu/Training/Event-Calendar/Archiving-Social-Media-Data-Challenges-and-Proposed-Solutions