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 in presence from, 19 to 20 March. The lectures 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 University Düsseldorf, GESIS)
Dimitar Dimitrov (GESIS)
Christoph Eggersglüß (Philipps University Marburg, NFDI4Culture)
Philippe Genêt (German National Library, Text+)
Tatjana Scheffler (Ruhr University Bochum)
Claus-Michael Schlesinger (University Library, Humboldt University Berlin)
Britta Woldering (German National Library)

Cooperation partners

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

Information and Contact

The event will be held in German.

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

Costs:

• Conference fee: 25.00 Euro
• For students: 15.00 Euro
• Participation via streaming: 5.00 Euro

Booking: Registration via Pretix

Registration deadline: 8 March 2024

Once you have registered, the symposium fee will be billed to you by e-mail. Please settle this invoice by 11 March 2024. Confirmation of your registration will be sent to you by e-mail when you have paid the symposium fee.

Cancellation terms

Once you have made your payment, the symposium fee can only be refunded if you cancel on or before 3 March 2024. If you have to cancel at short notice after 3 March 2024, or if the German National Library has to postpone the event for reasons which are outside its control (force majeure or similar circumstances such as national transport strikes), it will not be possible to refund the symposium fees. Refunds will not be given if you do not attend the symposium or are prevented from attending, regardless of the reason.

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

Accessibility: The area in which the event will be taking place is barrier-free accessible.

Contact: twarchiv@dnb.de

German National Library
Adickesallee 1
60322 Frankfurt am Main

Getting here

We advise you to use public transport.