Friday 29 August 2014

Storify and its research potential


By Beth Driscoll
@Beth_driscoll

I research literary culture on twitter, and one of the challenges I face is describing the shape of these conversations to a general audience: twitter can seem like a disorienting, fast-flowing river for those who do not use it frequently. I decided to try using Storify, and chose as a case study the live twitter stream that accompanied a session with author Gerald Murnane at the Melbourne Writers Festival on August 22nd, 2014. I was in the audience too and couldn't help tweeting some of his great one-liners!

What I liked about Storify was that it allowed me to group tweets, show the flow of mini conversations, highlight the participation of those who weren't there physically, and add supplementary notes e.g. where I noticed a disjuncture between what happened physically at the session and how it was reported on twitter. 

So this is a first go by me at this visualisation tool:

https://storify.com/Beth_driscoll/gerald-murnane-at-the-melbourne-writers-festival-2

After creating this Storify and posting it using my twitter account, I was pleased to see it re-tweeted and favourited a few times, suggesting this methodology has potential for the dissemination of research in an accessible format. 

No comments:

Post a Comment