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.
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:
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.
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