Digital Humanities Symposium -- Summary of Twitter Activity

Purpose This is a brief summary and outcomes of the twitter activity that took place during the Digital Humanities symposium1 in early November 2016 at Växjö, Sweden.

In order to stimulate discussion about Digital Humanities (DH), we asked2 the participants of the symposium to choose between four options of what a suitable definition of DH could be.

Technical details We were able to use the existing server implementation from our PEAR 4 VXO deploy- ment3, monitoring for any tweets that included the Linnæus University (LNU) Digital Humanities twitter account (@DigHum LNU) and any of the following hashtags: #DHoverlap, #DHapplication, #DHtools, and #DHother.

Although we prepared one, we chose not to release a dedicated Augmented Reality (AR) app, but to focus on the twitter activity. Instead we showed the live AR visualization on a large screen at the room where the symposium took place, using a webcam and a desktop version of the app on an iOS laptop.

Participation Figure 1 (left) shows when the relevant tweets were composed. The shaded area indicates when the symposium took place (on November 7 and 8). The red area indicates when a demo/presentation about PEAR took place in the last session of the first day. The letters E and T indicate when information emails and tweets about the activity were sent by the organizers. 

Figure 1: Twitter activity before & during the symposium (left), and the results (right). 

Results There have been overall 21 tweets, including 2 re-tweets by @DigHum LNU which are removed for the results – so only 19 tweets from 15 participants were considered. Figure 1 (right) shows the final distribution of opinions.

The system keeps track of the latest opinion per each participating Twitter account. Two participants tweeted multiple times with the same hashtag (#DHoverlap and #DHtools, three and two times respectively), and another participant tweeted twice with different hashtags indicating a change of mind (#DHovelap ⇒ #DHtools). One participant included two hashtags in one tweet (#DHoverlap, #DHtools) but only the last option was counted; this is a minor technical issue at the moment.

For any additional questions, comments, or how to deploy and make use of our PEAR frame- work please contact Dr. Aris Alissandrakis [aris.alissandrakislnu.se] at the Department of Media Technology, LNU.