Hi, it’s Neal again.
I’ve completed the rather epic task of coding and cataloguing the tweets which I mentioned last time – One spreadsheet alone contained 949 tweets. Ouch!
But it was a very useful task! Not only have I gained a feel for who the more important contributors are (their handles, but also their identities – Who they are as people), I’ve also gained a better understanding of what they’re tweeting about. Without giving too much away, a lot of it wasn’t terribly exciting but a breakthrough came today when I identified a set of tweets which formed a discussion which appears to have resulted in contributions to the discussion forums – Contributions which would assist other users with their activities both with the objects discussed and with other objects. This is a lot more exciting than it probably sounds on paper and I can’t wait to turn my attention to the discussion forums to see the relationship between the two resources.
Additionally, I’ve been characterising and analysing the 17 (!) active Zooniverse projects. This involved reading a paper and using that paper as a basis for drawing out information about different aspects of the projects to separate them from each other. Given how similar many of the projects are, this has been easier said than done and has required a bit of creativity. Fortunately, I’ve been doing this with Anna, so I haven’t had to do it alone. It’s been a great opportunity to get to know the various projects and it gave me a rather exciting excuse to transcribe some ancient Egyptian papyri, which were written in ancient Greek. Not that I’m blowing my own trumpet or anything.
I have a meeting on Monday to decide what we’re going to be doing with the Zooniverse data, so what this space:
(Don’t watch it too closely though. There are 3 more blogs to go yet!)
And seriously, look how pretty some of these research objects are!
The Social Machinists 