Social Media Engine: Extending our Methodology into other Objects of Scholarship

Abstract

In this paper we describe our efforts towards building a framework that extends the functionality of an Open Access Repository by implementing processes that integrate the ongoing trends in social media into the context of a digital collection—while taking into account the potential of social media, the relevance of open infrastructures and the accessibility of open knowledge. We refer to these processes collectively as the Social Media Engine. The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, we propose to challenge some of the preconceived notions of digital libraries by making repositories more dynamic; and second, by challenging this notion we want to promote public engagement and open scholarship. As a work in progress, we believe that a real challenge lies in emphasizing the connections between documents that can be treated as objects of study as well.

An Open Social Scholarship Path for the Humanities

“…Iter Community (https://itercommunity.org) is an evolving collaborative research environment that aims to facilitate social knowledge creation practices for communities that use Iter's discovery tools and publication platforms (Bowen, Hiebert, and Crompton 2014;Hiebert, Bowen, and Siemens 2015). The Social Media Engine is a tool that extracts topics from research articles of a given corpus and matches them to ongoing social media discussions (Meneses, Arbuckle, Lopez et al 2019). Rounding out this sample of a much larger list of innovative projects, A Social Edition of the Devonshire Manuscript is an open access, editable Wikibooks edition of a 16th-century verse miscellany (Crompton et al 2013;Siemens et al 2012).…”