Storify – Blogging For Historians

Is Storify and Twitter enabling a new method for academics to record conferences and take notes? It might seem so. Conferences tend to have Twitter hashtags these days as a means of allowing the audience to tweet about the conference as it progresses. If enough people do it, then the hashtag can actually recreate an aspect of the presentations in a bullet-pointed form. Storify is one means to capture, archive and store those tweet for use later and for sharing with others.

Here are a few examples:

Social Media Knowledge Exchange conference Day 1 Day 2

Voluntary Action History Society conference Day 3

Food in History Anglo-American conference 2013 Day 1 Day 2 Day 3

For an example of how the Storify tweet collection can be annotated see the ‘Twitter example for SMKE’ story in which Sarah Jackson has commented with her opinions about a series of tweets.

Example for social media knowledge exchange

And another one from the SMKE workshop held at the Institute of Historical Research in January 2013. This list has been annotated to demonstrate the power of tweets at an event:

Social Media Knowledge Exchange Workshop

Storify doesn’t just allow you to create a collection of tweets. It allows you to borrow from other social media (such as Facebook), websites and blogs. You could create a digital archive of an event that draws in everything mentioned about it on the web. You could do the same about a specific subject or anything you could imagine. However, there are some limitations. WordPress, for example, limits what you can do with Storify (see here). It is possible to embed a Storify story on Tumblr (see here).

At the moment Storify is an interesting development which could be highly useful. I was skeptical at first but I’m now beginning to see how it could be used and used well. Only time will tell of course if it is taken up by academics but it might well be worth a look.

The CRASSH centre, University of Cambridge

For the last two days I was at the SMKE Social Media conference (Social Media Knowledge Exchange). It’s been really great few days, with plenty of interesting ideas raised, concerns and thoughts expressed, and meeting lots of people with interesting areas of research and interests. My deepest thanks go out to the SMKE organisers, especially our hosts the CRASSH centre at Cambridge. Anne Alexander especially deserves mention for coordinating everything so well.

A large element of the conference was the SMKE scholar projects that have been funded over the last year. We had everything from research into computer games and virtual realities, to social media as a tool for protest and organisation. Questions of legitimacy and verification were raised, concerns over ethics and copyright discussed, and thoughts about the benefits and risks of social media mulled over.

As a whole these sessions proved to be much more than showcasing projects, but thought provoking talks that showed off the various benefits and weaknesses of social media and gave a hint as to future ways forward.

First thing on the second day (Wednesday) it was my turn to talk about the Blogging for Historians project. I went through some of the things that were said by the bloggers who I have interviewed for this project, and discussed a little bit about my findings. It was interesting that it was the comment about word length and the style of writing for a blog that provoked the most interest and discussion. How long should a blog post be? Should we be suggesting a minimum or maximum? Is length really all that important or is it the style of the post that really matters? What draws people in and what sends them away? I’ll be thinking about this and other things as I finalise the toolkit for this project and I will try and post here about some of those musings as they begin to take form.

I’m told that the SMKE website will soon display lots of content about these and the other presentations, but for now here’s a link to the conference programme and to the Storify collection of Twitter posts (day one and day two) that they have gathered together. There was a lot of twittering, which is perhaps not that unexpected considering the topic of the conference but it surprised me just how much these 150 character long pieces managed to capture a good fraction of the conference for posterity.