SOMAR Partners with TIND to Build New Archive for Social Media Data
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
ANN ARBOR–The Social Media Archive (SOMAR) has partnered with TIND, a spinoff company of CERN, to build a new repository for social media data.
As the first data resource of its kind, SOMAR’s goal is to make social media data accessible to researchers, students, journalists, and others who lack the technical, computing, and financial resources to capture, share, and access the data independently. The archive also aims to provide a data resource that offers open and equitable access to social media data from large-scale social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit, as well as smaller, more specialized datasets focused on specific research topics. Part of the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), SOMAR has been exploring and learning about various approaches to develop data archiving infrastructure, assessing researcher and data depositor needs, and building partnerships with other archives and software organizations.
TIND’s Research Data Management (RDM) technology, based on Invenio, enables SOMAR to ingest and share large files while utilizing the ICPSR standard metadata and experimenting with new unique social media data fields. The partnership with TIND enabled ICPSR to build SOMAR’s website in under two months, providing social media researchers with a fast and effective way to store and share their data.
The collaboration will allow SOMAR to learn more about social media data users' needs and continue improving their research. Specifically, SOMAR plans to obtain and evaluate feedback from those using SOMAR’s website to explore, access, or share social media data. The archive will utilize this feedback to enhance the website user experience for the social media data user and depositors and to inform ICPSR’s future infrastructure development. “Setting up the new platform [with TIND] is a significant step forward for SOMAR, providing a more efficient solution for storing and sharing [various types of] social media data,” said Abay Israel, former Product Manager at ICPSR.
“TIND RDM seemed to be a perfect fit for SOMAR: a turnkey data repository providing data submission forms, data review workflows, and automated software archiving from Github. This is an exciting project, and we’re very excited to follow the progress of SOMAR,” said Alexander Nietzold, CEO at TIND.
About SOMAR:
SOMAR, part of ICPSR, a center within the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, is a new data archive dedicated to making social media data accessible and useful to researchers like never before. Its mission is to provide a platform that allows researchers to work with and analyze social media data, enabling them to study social media behavior, patterns, and trends.
About TIND:
TIND is a leading provider of digital archiving and library management solutions. Their managed solutions technology enables organizations to store, share, and manage their research data easily.
Related:
- ICPSR to host data on social media’s impact on US 2020 elections
- Democratizing Social Media Data for Research Impact
Contact: Dory Knight-Ingram
Mar 9, 2023