The Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania: Using Facebook to Document a Community

Abstract

In 2013, Temple University PhD candidate Melissa R. Meade started a Facebook page for the Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania, to share and curate material relevant to her community-based ethnographic dissertation project. The page has evolved into a place in which community members meet and gather digitally to reflect upon history, memories, culture, and media of the greater Anthracite Region. While Facebook practically serves as an excellent platform for communication, it is not symbiotic for necessary cataloging, searching, and archiving of information. The Anthracite Coal Region of Northeastern Pennsylvania is a work in progress with endless possibilities. For this talk, we intend to focus on a description of the Facebook page and community, and discuss our attempts to extract data, our ideas of how we might use that data to further scholarship and understanding of the history of the region, and discuss challenges in bridging these divides