[Air-L] creating a unique hashtag to track a specific event

Stephanie Jo Kent kentcon at sover.net
Thu Apr 15 17:56:13 PDT 2010


Hi all,

I have been a quasi-lurker for @6 years. I have interacted with a few  
of you (thanks!). Some day I imagine I'll have something substantive  
to contribute; to date my attempts have been diverted into other  
directions.

Next week, a colleague and I will conduct an action research project  
at a conference, "The Science of Team Science." We will invite  
conference participants to tweet thoughts, observations, commentary,  
jokes, etc during the conference, in order to build a supplementary  
database for the authorized task of our poster session.

Any suggestions on how to set this up so that the stream remains  
relatively 'clean'? There is probably a technical term, but what I  
mean is boundaried - as much as possible - to the participants of the  
conference. I created the hashtag #socialSTS as a test. At the moment,  
it does not come up in search, not even advanced search....and it is  
close to 'socialist' which might be a problem(?).  I am supposing that  
if/when the number of relevant tweets increases then the twitter  
search engine will find them, am I correct? Or, is the scale so small  
(<200 people, with who knows what percentage actually participating)  
that I need to set up some actual architecture? (I'll be thrilled if  
even a few percent contribute, since this is so experimental.)

Maybe bringthesocial is a better hashtag, and closer to the name of  
our poster/project.

I've kept my own tweets private until today (I've hardly been a user  
at all). I thought I ought to make them public for this project? If  
the idea catches on, for instance, there may be people who wished they  
could attend the conference but couldn't.... and who might want to  
participate vicariously...?  (Yes, call me a dreamer, grin.)

I'm sure there is a range of implications I've yet to consider. If  
anyone knows of similar projects, or has ideas about implementing this  
one, I'll be grateful for the opportunity to hash this through. (Pun  
intended - which is not usually my style!)

thanks very much,
steph



-- 
Stephanie Jo Kent

Weblog: http://www.reflexivity.us
email: stephanie.kent at fulbrightmail.org
mobile: 1 (413) 824-9663

Fulbright Fellow to the European Institutions, 2008-2009
Doctoral Candidate, Communication, University of Massachusetts Amherst  
USA
Master of Education, Social Justice Education
Certified American Sign Language/English Interpreter





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