These are the analyses that we are doing with Moses Boudourides and Sergios Lenis (Department of Mathematics, University of Patras) in the context of the LIBER Annual Conference 2017 presence on Twitter. The conference took place in Patras, Greece, July 5–7, 2017. LIBER is the European Association of Research Libraries and its Annual Conference is one of the most important gatherings for library professionals in Europe. It is organized since 1971 and runs annually on a different European city. With the advent of technology and social media, the LIBER Annual Conference has gained a significant exposure on the digital sphere of professional publicity. In 2016, the Finnish organizers in Helsinki had counted a number of 4300 tweets with the hashtag #liber2016. The conference has one main track that runs three days, which is preceded by some pre-conference activities three days before.
A video overview of LIBER2017 can be found below:
For our purposes, we collected tweets based on the search terms @liberconference, #liberconference, #liber2017 and #liber17. Hashtags are being gathered since June 30, 2016, when the conference version of Helsinki ended. Below you will find some snippets of this analysis. These are based on the retrospective analysis of these hashtags (#, as said since June 30, 2016), but includes also the entire activity of the account (@). Moses Boudourides has published a comprehensive report on Medium about this process, which I invite you to read.
It is important to note that the hashtag #liber2017 has been very popular in the Greek Twitter sphere and was a trending topic all three days of the conference, as you can see from the instance beside.
All analyses were implemented in an Apache Zeppelin Notebook. Anyone interested in a more detailed account of this work or getting access to the Zeppelin notebooks can do that by going to http://150.140.171.51:9980/#/ and typing liberconf, both as username and password. So, please consider this is as an on-going work. In the near future, we are going to put these figures and graphs on this site in interactive format, so that you have not to go to that site.
This is chart of depicting the number of tweets and the number of people tweeting about the conference (tweeple). We had 2.066 and 219 users tweeting about the conference. It is difficult to cross-check how many of them were present, since we know that some of them (we could recognize a couple of persons that were absent) were tweeting about the conference. With the exception of the @liberconference and @LIBEREurope accounts, we had three other accounts, namely @CKamposiori, @ringejacq and @Lottewilms that were very active!
The tweets peaked on Wednesday, July 5, when we had 102 users posting 371 original tweets. On that day the conference got another 179 mentions. Also that day we had 551 different hashtags used in these tweets. Some of them, #liber2017 excluded, were #openscience (n=50), #openaccess (n=49), #patras (n=34), #liberemergingleaders (n=34), #libraries (n=28), #oa (n=27), #copyright (n=25) and #tdm (n=24).
When it comes to media, Tweeple of the #liber2017 hashtag posted mainly photographs, not videos. This is quite common in conference, where people upload images of slides, exhibition stands, infographics or any other kind of images. In our case, we show that on Thursday, when we uploaded a very nice video recap of the first day on Vimeo (you may have a look at it here) we had 5 tweets with the video embedded.
Then, a pie chart of the languages shows the languages of the tweets. Quite naturally these are in English (93%), but as you may remember we have gathered data from the account of the conference as well, which means that shorter percentages are in other languages as well. Note that und means undefined.
We also calculated the polarity of sentiments of the tweets. It shows that the LIBER conference, in general, builds a very good experience and the outcome is very positive.
In terms of subjectivity, some small negative rates were recorded for tweets that had the hashtags #copyright and #liberemergingleaders.
Finally, there is one network graph that shows how hashtags interact together, meaning how often they co-occur in same tweets. Please, since there are different networks of the many LIBER conferences linked together by common hashtags, pay attention to the blue-colored network that refers to #liber2017.
The other graph is how users interact together, meaning which users are mentioned in #liber2017 tweets (of course by other users). The graph in this case is a directed one, showing that x mentions y.
With some patience, this post will be improved with the substitution of the images with interactive graphs that will help you explore these results.
Many thanks to Moses Boudourides and Sergios Lenis.
Regarding LIBER2017, some photos from the conference can be found organized in albums in LIBER’s Flickr account. Several colleagues from all around Europe have written their reports about the conference. You can read what Eleanor Warren and Christina Kamposiori wrote on their organizations’ blogs, here and here respectively.
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