Characteristics of Social Media Stories

An emerging trend in social media is for users to create and publish stories , or curated lists of web resources with the purpose of creating a particular narrative of interest to the user. While some stories on the web are automatically generated, such as Facebook’s Year in Review , one of the most popular storytelling services is Storify , which provides users with curation tools to select, arrange, and annotate stories with content from social media and the web at large. We would like to use tools like Storify to present automatically created summaries of archival collections. To support automatic story creation, we need to better understand as a baseline the structural characteristics of popular (i.e., receiving the most views) human-generated stories. We investigated 14,568 stories from Storify, comprising 1,251,160 individual resources, and found that popular stories (i.e., top 25 % of views normalized by time available on the web) have the following characteristics: 2/28/1950 elements (min/median/max), a median of 12 multimedia resources (e.g., images, video), 38 % receive continuing edits, and 11 % of the elements are missing from the live web

Web strategies for the curation and discovery of openeducational resources

For those receiving funding from the UK HEFCE-funded Open Educational Resource Programme (2009 – 2012), the sustainability of project outputs was one of a number of essential goals. Our approach for the hosting and distribution of health and life science open educational resources (OER) was based on the utilisation of the WordPress.org blogging platform and search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques to curate content and widen discovery. This paper outlines the approaches taken and tools used at the time, and reflects upon the effectiveness of web strategies several years post-funding. The paper concludes that using WordPress.org as a platform for sharing and curating OER, and the adoption of a pragmatic approach to SEO, offers cheap and simple ways for small scale open education projects to be effective and sustainable

Digital Content Curation and Why It Matters to Librarians

The article discusses the concept of digital content curation. The idea behind curation, sometimes called aggregation, is linking and/or excerpting the work of others. This has far-reaching impact in terms of evaluation and attribution

The Everywhere Museum of Everything: the curatorship challenge, from cigital urban art to NFTs

This article focuses on the overproduction of aestheticised digital content, a testament to social, cultural or recreational experiences, paradoxically short-lived and forgotten. These public aestheticised digital records of social interactions, intellectual engagement or consumerist indulgence are uploaded onto social networks and represent not only a real and abundant ethnographic portrait of contemporaneity, which could be searchable by geography, demography or subject, but also acquire remarkable potential as raw material for creative and artistic research, remixing, digital archaeology or exhibition. From this point of view, their curation is justified. The Everywhere Museum of Everything is the designation given by the author to the augmented urban spaces, populated by these layers of original and remixed digital audio-visual information, interconnected by hashtags and geo-tags, which can be rendered visible through augmented reality tools, thus transforming any urban space into a digital gallery of their recent social, aesthetic or ethnographic history.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

From creation to curation: evolution of an authentic 'Assessment for Learning' task

Authenticity is an important characteristic of learning experiences and contributes to transfer of learning into practice but maintaining authenticity as practice changes is challenging. This paper describes action research undertaken to guide the evolution of an authentic assessment task in a teacher preparation course responding to changes in the program and the wider educational environment. As teaching resources have become more readily available online, the task has evolved from one of creating teaching resources to curating and sharing collections of resources that may be adapted or adopted. Lessons learned through reflection during the evolutionary process and prospective developments are discussed in light of the effectiveness of the evolution of the task in responding to the changing circumstances

The Digital Identity of Graduate Students

Graduate students need a digital identity in order to be found by an academic colleague or a future employer. However, the lack of technical skills and familiarity with the necessary digital tools is a handicap even when graduate students use their personal social network accounts. The construction of their own professional brand starts with the choice of the right strategy and tools. Not all graduate students have the same goals, needs, requirements, and skills. Those who are doing a PhD do not need the same digital identity as those who are getting a master’s degree. In fact, their online visibility and their personal and professional goals are different. So the structure of their digital identity and the tools necessary for this identity must also be somewhat different. Furthermore, the use of the right online tools is not always easy to manage. The proper use of a tool and the right content for publication on social media are of prime importance. The use of different platforms such as scholarly social networks or professional social networks must be clearly distinguished. It is true that gaining online visibility helps the graduate student, and not only in his or her personal or professional lives. In the long term, online visibility also helps the institution where the graduate student is enrolled. Therefore, online reputation must be treated carefully

Social Bootstrapping: How Pinterest and Last.fm Social Communities Benefit by Borrowing Links from Facebook

How does one develop a new online community that is highly engaging to each user and promotes social interaction? A number of websites offer friend-finding features that help users bootstrap social networks on the website by copying links from an established network like Facebook or Twitter. This paper quantifies the extent to which such social bootstrapping is effective in enhancing a social experience of the website. First, we develop a stylised analytical model that suggests that copying tends to produce a giant connected component (i.e., a connected community) quickly and preserves properties such as reciprocity and clustering, up to a linear multiplicative factor. Second, we use data from two websites, Pinterest and Last.fm, to empirically compare the subgraph of links copied from Facebook to links created natively. We find that the copied subgraph has a giant component, higher reciprocity and clustering, and confirm that the copied connections see higher social interactions. However, the need for copying diminishes as users become more active and influential. Such users tend to create links natively on the website, to users who are more similar to them than their Facebook friends. Our findings give new insights into understanding how bootstrapping from established social networks can help engage new users by enhancing social interactivity.Comment: Proc. 23rd International World Wide Web Conference (WWW), 201