Close Encounters of the Social Media Kind: Mining Online Content for Primary Sources, Part 2: Navigating the Profession when Bits Rot, MOOCs Attract, and Social Media Become History

Session Abstract

Following the session “Unmediated Voices, Mediated Platforms: Seeking the “Other” through Social Media,” this session continues the dialogue on the theme of social media content providing new primary sources for historical research, explores related digital preservation and curation issues, and opens the floor to discussion with the public. 

 E. Friss will discuss how Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) challenge traditional pedagogical models, but at the same time can inform history through the archival footprint that students and instructors leave while interacting online. R. Dunley will explore the often uneasy relationship between history and journalism and what they can learn from each other when it comes to new technologies. D. VandeCreek will outline issues of long-term preservation of digital objects and present findings and lessons learned from an IMLS-funded multi-institutional study. Finally, Amalia S. Levi will examine how practices in memory institutions (libraries, archives, museums) affect scholarly communication and how they can involve historians in the process of enhancing the contextualization of cultural heritage holdings. 

 Culminating the multi-session workshop, this session is intended to be highly interactive, and audience members are invited to contribute their ideas and suggestions.