In Artefact-Actor-Networks we are analyzing data from social media in order to enhance researchers’ awareness about their collaboration, activities of their fellow researchers, ongoing processes and emerging trends. This week we released the beta version of a service that is important for gaining clean user data for those analyzes. The service is called soharc which stands for social handle archive and aims as being a central hub for social handles and scientific events.

Driven from the fact that many people in my community are collecting data from social media (you remember all of our Twitter analysis and the cool Delicious visualizations, don’t you?) and always struggling with the question: where to get clean data from, the idea of soharc was born.

What you can do in soharc is fairly simple: you create your online profile with the handles you possess and we’ll create a dedicated page for you. You can create “scientific” events or projects and join them, so everybody who’s interested can see what you are doing. In order to support scientific awareness and solve the problem of how to get clean data, we’ll be soon offering a SWRC export of your social media profile and those of an event’s or project’s participants. This will allow the aggregation of social media data for analyses with multiple tools, done by different people and organizations based on a well-defined and user-generated dataset.

Cool, right? Let me know what you think about the social handle archive in the comments. I’d like to thank Peter Kraker and Gonzalo Parra for the chats we had on soharc and their alpha tests of the service.

The provided data will be used for social media analyses around conferences other scientific events or projects. Doing this will not only help us, it will additionally enhance your network opportunities during the conference and give more visibility to your academic work. The provision of such data is voluntary and you can delete your personal information at any time. This information will be publicly available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license. If you like to make use of this data yourself, please do not hesitate to contact us.

NB: SWRC export is not yet enabled as we are discussing a new version of the ontology together with researchers from STELLAR and FZI.

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