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Social media and historians, why bother?
S Social media and historians; why bother?
This animation discusses the relevance and historical value of social media for the historical community.
Lesson on how to deal with the abundance of digital born data, with regard to research, reaching out to audiences, teaching, and preservation strategies, using social media as a case study.
This lesson discusses the relationship between social media and the practice of academic historians from the perspective of source criticism, public outreach, and preservation. The objective is to teach historians how to make critical use of social media for their research. The lesson offers a short clip and a series of assignments that deal with social media from various perspectives: their historical and pedagogical value, their diverse uses, as well as the technological, cultural and economic variety of platforms that host them across the world. A more in-depth analysis is offered of Twitter, a microblogging service widely used for academic research.
Social media and historians, why bother?
This animation discusses the relevance and historical value of social media for the historical community.
Amongst historians, it is argued that in order to consider an event “mature” enough for historical inquiry, there should be distance in time and access to classified documents. This idea of a necessary waiting period has long determined the historicity of a given event or topic. The advent of the web and social media—with direct access to an abundance of data, especially in the realm of private life—seems to have challenged the idea of what can be considered as “historical”. In this assignment, you are going to be confronted with different opinions on the role of social media in history and whether they can be considered historical sources.
Image credits: Linaria Comunicación via Giphy, INTO ACTION via Giphy, Flamingo Services via Giphy
When looking at social media from a historian’s perspective, it is important to remember that opinions differ between experts on how to even define “social media” as well as whether or not this form of communication existed in the pre-internet era. Much of these debates hinge on whether the technical infrastructure as such is the innovative element, or what people do with the technical infrastructure when it becomes available. From the perspective of a historian, the term “social media” is problematic, as media have a social function by definition. Even within the scope of the digital era, the term ‘social’ poses problems, as it can confusingly also refer to the pioneering sharing platforms that evolved in the early 2000s, such as MySpace and Friendster. At the time, they were coined Social Networking Sites. With the introduction of Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram and Snapchat, arguably geared towards sharing content more than creating networks, the broader term “social media” gained traction. In this assignment, you are going to explore the historical continuities and discontinuities of the phenomenon of social media.
“2021 World Map of Social Networks”. Image created by Vincenzo Cosenza and used here without adaptation from the original on Vinco’s Blog under Creative Commons License CC-BY-NC.
In this assignment, you are expected to conduct web research to complete the profiles of different social media platforms. There are many approaches to specifying the characteristics of a social medium; for instance, one can consider the technology and the type of communication it facilitates, the user experience, or focus on the policy and strategy of the company that runs the social medium, the business model. These different approaches help to better understand what these different social media actually are and classifying their typology allows historians to more accurately analyse the digital sources that are produced by them as content.
Smartphone Social Media
“Digital Preservation.” Image created by Jørgen Stamp and used here without adaptation from the original on Digitalbevaring.dk under Creative Commons License CC BY 2.5 DK.
In this assignment, a series of examples is presented in which a social medium has been used to:
- Illustrate the changes in the practice of historians,
- Teach history in a new way,
- Spread fake history,
- Document a historical event
For each example below, write a short text (150 words max.) about how it applies to one or more of the four cases above as well as what arguments are put forward by the corresponding article.
In this assignment, the various features/dimensions of the social medium Twitter are discussed: its history, how it is used, how it is analyzed and how it is preserved/archived. (For instructions on how to work with social media data we refer to the module LARGE, as more time, effort and guidance is required) Answer the questions below in your answer form.
Image credit: The Lighthouse(@the_bercibot) - https://twitter.com/the_bercibot/status/1379647473640161280
Image credit: Screenshot of selecting “reply” to an already posted Tweet taken on a desktop computer on 14 April 2021.
