At the Digital Day of Ideas, it was fantastic to meet many colleagues working in digital humanities or information services. I attended a workshop on using Google Sheets and Google Analytics to analyse discussion data. While I expected that this would be discussion data from virtual learning environments, this ended up being a very techy session but I was able to use the code provided to extract the 253 tweets on #studentengagement in the last seven days and map the location of the tweets. While this was not particularly relevant to my work, it was interesting to think more broadly about how Twitter data and other digital data is used more widely.
This theme was explored more deeply in Karen Gregory's keynote 'Conceptualising Digital Sociology as Critical, Interdisciplinary Practice'. For me, this keynote highlighted how individuals are becoming co-producers of their own digital data (via social media, FitBits, biometric data, data from wearable technology, etc). I took from this the need to engage students in discussions about how their data is being used, how to evaluate trustworthy sources, and how to engage critically with the digital world which is evolving around us.
For much more on the Digital Day of Ideas, visit http://www.digital.hss.ed.ac.uk/.
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