The researchers from Northumbria and Edinburgh are working on a pilot study. In this study we wish to use triptychs to better understand story-telling using personal digital data. Participants are being asked to compile three images from their social media accounts which simply ‘tell a story’ about themselves. Once the digital images have been collected, participants will be interviewed about their choices and given them in a triptych frame to keep.
This week a phase of study has been launched by the Northumbria University team who are recruiting participants for their study- utilising MySocialBook as an archiving tool for life events. They are looking for people with a rich and interactive Facebook profile, aged 25-65, to take part in interviews about social media content and create their own scrapbook- contact lisa.thomas@northumbria.ac.uk
On Monday 27th October Lisa will be presenting some findings from ReelLives interviews at the NordiCHI Animal-Computer Interaction workshop in Helsinki. The paper is titled “Social Petworking: The Influence of Animals on Our Digital Narratives”, and highlights the importance of animals in identity narratives for young people.
The ReelLives partners met this week in Northumbria University in Newcastle for a two-day general meeting to discuss work progress and to foster further collaboration. The highlight of the meeting was the viewing and critiquing of the six films that were developed by professional film makers as part of the ReelLives Film Competition that was launched in March this year. The films provide valuable and rare examples of how social media content can be turned into short films to portray the life of individuals.
Dr Smitashree Choudhury from the Knowledge Media institute presented a paper titled “Personal Life Event Detection from Social Media”
at a workshop on Social Personalisation, co-located with ACM Hypertext 2014, which was held on 1-4 September in Santiago, Chile. The paper describes a model to detect a number of prominent personal life events from Twitter, a key step towards the generation of reels from social media content. 