Lecture 6: Twitter & Agriculture, Life & Environmental Sciences

Image from the article below via Government Technology

Have a read of this article by Lauren Katims, pertinent to today's lecture:

"There’s so much misinformation out there about farming and what farmers do. A lot of people have lost track of where their food comes from,” said Dino Giacomazzi, a fourth-generation dairy farmer in central California who travels around the country training farmers on social media use. He also has a popular blog, Facebook page and Twitter account (@dairydino) with thousands of farmer followers.
“We invite people onto our farms through the Internet,” he said. “We let people see exactly what it is that we do.”

[...]

A recent conference on farmers and social media hosted by the University of California, Davis, brought 80 attendees, including www.agchat.org president Jeff Fowle, who currently has more than 25,000 Twitter followers.
Earlier this year, he and a group of farmers created the AgChat Foundation, a nonprofit designed to empower more farmers to leverage social media as a tool. The group hosts weekly discussions on Twitter about various topics and how they affect the agriculture industry.
The foundation hopes to start giving technology scholarships to needy farmers by the time they get back in the fields this spring, donating smartphones, aircards, flipcams, laptops, iPads and in some cases high-speed Internet.
The goal, the foundation said in an e-mail, “is to encourage more people to interact with farmers and get their questions answered about farming directly from the source.”


Giacomazzi added, “It’s about selling the industry; it’s about saving the lifestyle of these farmers. And we’ll do that at whatever cost to us.”

Today's Outline

•Review of Twitter
•Twitter Search
•Twitter Analytics
•Twitter & its Role in Science
•Activity
•Further Reading: Twitter Guidebook

•Homework



Hashtag Activity:

•With a partner:
•Search #AgChat on Twitter
•Peruse the 10-20 most recent tweets
•Discuss: What do you notice?
–Who is tweeting
–Are there any re-occurring topics?
–Are there citations/links to other sources?
–Do many tweets include (links to) images or videos?

Activity :: Following Meaningful Content

•Find a scientist/farmer/someone in your field on Twitter
•A useful place to start is TweepML and search for “scientists”: http://tweepml.org/search?query=scientists&x=0&y=0
•Or try wefollow: http://wefollow.com/twitter/scientist
•Tell @JessL WHY you chose to follow a particular scientist & HOW their tweets will be meaningful to your studies

Homework:

•Tweet two short reflections on what you learnt today. Think specifically about case studies of how people in science/ag use Twitter.
•Remember to mark all class tweets @JessL and use our #ALES204 hashtag
•Read “Why Twitter Will Endure” - David Carr, NY Times, 2010: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/weekinreview/03carr.html



Of interest for further reading:

Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages

Letierce, Julie and Passant, Alexandre and Breslin, John and Decker, Stefan (2010) Understanding how Twitter is used to spread scientific messages. In: Proceedings of the WebSci10: Extending the Frontiers of Society On-Line, April 26-27th, 2010, Raleigh, NC: US.

	PDF (preprint) - Repository staff only - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf orAdobe Acrobat Reader 340Kb
	PDF (Final Version) - Requires a PDF viewer such as GSview, Xpdf or Adobe Acrobat Reader 1814Kb

Abstract

According to a survey we recently conducted, Twitter was ranked in the top three services used by Semantic Web researchers to spread information. In order to understand how Twitter is practically used for spreading scientific messages, we captured tweets containing the official hashtags of three conferences and studied (1) the type of content that researchers are more likely to tweet, (2) how they do it, and finally (3) if their tweets can reach other communities — in addition to their own. In addition, we also conducted some interviews to complete our understanding of researchers’ motivation to use Twitter during conferences.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Twitter, Scientific Communication, Semantic Web Community, Tagging, Science Dissemination
Subjects:	Web Science Events > Web Science 2010
ID Code:	314
Deposited By:	W S T Administrator
Deposited On:	15 Mar 2010 10:09
Last Modified:	25 Oct 2011 16:57

Lecture 6 2012 twitter & science

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