Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices

Chapter 6 Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices James Cohen and Paul Mihailidis A Ubiquitous Digital Media Landscape In the current digital media environment, differentiating quality content from questionable content is an arduous task. The sheer breadth and scope of content created, aggregated, uploaded and disseminated to the Internet every day, in real time, with little regard for boundaries or borders is staggering. New events that occur locally, nationally, or globally are now longer stories told by the few in media organizations, but rather told simultaneously by groups of interested onlookers. A savvy citizen is faced with the prospect of locating information focused on a specific topic, yet with few linear pathways for gathering, critiquing, and securing relevant, balanced, and independent information. To focus research findings, discover authority, explore framing, and navigate source material now require new competencies for the of information seeker. Traditionally, the user in search of data would expect “experts to go through information, ideas, and knowledge and put them neatly away” (Weinberger 2007). In the present, every person who tags, posts, shares, uploads original content becomes the expert of their data. Identifying authority while researching requires in depth analysis of information in order to not only satisfy the reader, but to challenge them to consider a deeper meaning. This chapter examines a practical approach to researching information using online tools, specifically, the online curation platform Storify. The current digital media environment has allowed access to a multitude of content, but also to information that may be unverified, libelous, or even completely false. To combat this new media landscape, new technologies must be harnessed that reflect and advance the hyper information sphere that digital media culture now exploits. This chapter will examine several methods of research using popular social media tools and platforms, with the hope of creating more effective measures for information gathering, assessment, expression and dissemination. Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices 87 Social Media and New Modes of Inquiry Clay Shirky identified the paradox of authority in Here Comes Everybody (2008) when he argued that the definition of journalist was weakened by the fact that “anyone in the developed world can publish anything anytime, and the instant it is published, it is globally available and readily available” (2008:71). From bloggers to Wikipedia editors, those who have access, have authority. In locations with growing access, information from important events gains value when the uploader has the advantage of exclusivity. When terrorists attacked the London subway in 2005, the photo-sharing site Flickr became a source of information for journalists around the world. “Flickr beat many traditional news outlets by providing these photos, because there were few photojournalists in the affected parts of the transport network (three separate trains on the Underground, and a bus), but many people near the those parts of the transport system had camera-phones that could e-mail the pictures in (Shirky, 2008).” This shift in the sharing and reception of information has led to a new role for social media tools and platforms in how citizens hear about issues, share information and opinions, and gathering relevant information. Additionally, social media as a communications technology allows for sharing content instantly from every place a user may be located. The downed US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River sparked a conversation of how Twitter is utilized as value added information to the newsreporting sphere. Communication through Twitter is limited to 140 characters (a similar count to a text message) and “produces at best eloquently terse responses and at worst heavily truncated speech” (Murthy, 2011). On that fateful day in 2009, Janis Krums, a New York Ferry passenger who happened to be the first to report on the downed airliner, was instantly converted to journalist reporter as his Twitter post and photograph happened to be the first visual of the event. Having access to Krums’ tweets allowed journalists and readers to understand the story in real-time rather than the experience of waiting for printed media or television news trucks to arrive and set up. The chain of events that caused the plane accident throughout the crash aftermath are now in a time documentable format. The importance of time documentation of event research and storytelling also came about the night of the Osama bin Laden raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan when Sohaib Athar “liveblogged the Osama raid without knowing it” as Athar posted on his Twitter. When recreating the story for the newspaper or television, these social media posts became part of the narrative. As journalists would have traditionally told the story from a finished informational status, Athar’s tweets included a personal narrative that added a valuable addition to the reports. The Twitter posts suggest a more personal attachment to a breaking news story. Social media posting from citizen journalists are not without their fair amount of criticism. Twitter has been accused of undermining the gatekeeping functions 88 Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices of journalists (Hermida, 2010) and shifting way from the classical paradigm of journalism as a framework to provide reports and analyses of events through narratives (Dahlgren, 1996). According to Bartlett and Miller (2011), young people are not careful, discerning users of the Internet and are vulnerable to pitfalls of falsehoods, ignorance and scams. Their solution is not greater censorship or tighter control, but to create young people who are careful, skeptical and savvy judges of Internet content (2011). Nevertheless, scholars have explored the efficacy of curation as a digital and media literacy tool to build competencies in using social media to facilitate all facets of daily life. In their book Connected, Christakis and Fowler (2012) explore the new connective power of social media to build collaborative landscapes for human interaction. They write: Our interactions, fostered and supported by new technologies, but existing even with them, create new social phenomenon that transcend individual experience by enriching and enlarging it, and this has significant implications for the collective good. Networks help make the whole of humanity much greater than the sum of its parts, and the invention of new ways to connect promises to increase our power to achieve what nature has foreordained (286). Recent research by Mihailidis (2013a; 2013b; Forthcoming) has found that youth today primarily use aggregated and curated spaces for information consumption, sharing, and production. They start social, exploring and curating information they see from peer news feeds, tweets, video and photo sharing sites and the like. The maintenance of their social spaces necessarily entails the integration of images, audio, video and print, from top down and bottom up sources, and from a wider array of diverse voices than was ever possible before. This type of information curation is necessitated by the social platforms and abundance of information that young people must navigate with savvy on a daily basis. The result is a rich and active debate around how these tools will influence social and civic engagement. Scholars have commended the new possibilities that social technologies have provided for increased collaborative production (Benkler, 2005; Benkler & Nissenbaum, 2006; Lessig, 2008), for crowdsourced participative potential in civic activities (Brabham, 2008; Surwowiecki, 2005; Howe, 2008) and for the increased value provided in peer-to-peer participatory models for engagement in daily life (Jenkins 2006, 2009; Shirky, 2010). Some are weary of the impact of social media technologies on the ability for individuals to extend their information and communication needs in real and meaningful ways (Gladwell, 2010; Dean, 2005; Morozov, 2010). Nevertheless, social media have increasingly become the central facilitators for information and communication in local and global contexts in a digital media culture. With this comes the act of curation as a foundational user tactic to make sense of and sort the steady flow of information that is encountered on a daily basis. Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices 89 Online Tools The flow of information previous to the digital environment did not favor the average web users who were at the will of content organizers and suppliers of content. In 2007 this process evolved when Twitter user and consultant Chris Messina discovered a small hack inside Twitter. He noticed that when he added the pound symbol, or hashmark, his work became a hyperlink that created search results organized around that specific keyword which allowed him to create groups inside the site (Gannes, 2010). The keyword became the tag, shorthand for subject category, for that word and the “hashtag” was created. This new organization method allowed the end user to reconfigure the information supply chain and become the researcher of any topic posted on Twitter. The hashtag, while expanding its location beyond use within Twitter, has become a necessity among users looking to organize and aggregate information. Used widely in Tumblr, Google Plus, and Instagram among several others, the popularity of the hashtag boomed when utilized as a community organizational tool. At the onset of the Arab Spring in January 2011, the hashtag #Jan25 and #Egypt were used to signify a place for users to contribute to a quickly growing rebellion against the Egyptian government and also a way to gauge support outside of Egypt (Schonfeld, 2011). The hashtag was also in prominent use during the Occupy Wall Street protests that began in New York City and later expanded to the Occupy movement worldwide. The hashtags #OWS, #Occupy, #99percent (and later #OccupyLondon and #OccupySidney) became battle cries for those looking to protest, to help out, to donate and to spread the word. The information gathered helped protestors figure out meeting places, share and collect new information, and spread awareness worldwide. The hashtag was like a television channel tuned to that specific topic, always feeding the newest information. Attempting to quantify the data pouring in became an arduous task. Those looking to tell the story of the movements had to manually discover the information across several social media platforms and convert the information into a coherent narrative. In the case of Occupy Wall Street, many of the themes and protests were varied. While the protests began as attacks on income inequality in the United States, the attendees of many of the protests also arrived with protest themes about the environment, student debt, and racism. The varied themes may have diversified the original intent, but the impact was still strong and “created an important national conversation about economic inequality and upward mobility” (Sorkin, 2012). The news reported and posted during the Occupy Movement and protests, however varied, can be collected and further narrated from multiple points of view and explanations. To create a story based on breaking news or a developing narrative, there are several online tools available to help organize information. To discover a subtext or analyze a story in depth, software like Wordle or IBM’s ManyEyes use data sets, especially in the form of text, and analyze it to discover deeper meaning of the written content. If you are to analye 90 Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices articles regarding Occupy Wall Street, you could accumulate data from dozens of articles and use ManyEyes. The software outputs a word cloud creating a textual display with different sized words based on their amount of usage. For example, if the word “occupy” was used often, the software will output the word larger whereas a word such as “leader” was used fewer times, it would result in a small word (Figure 6.1). Figure 6.1 – Data visualization from Brisbane, A. (2011) Who is Occupy Wall Street? The New York Times. Curation The act of curating is rooted in collecting and displaying objects and materials such as paintings, sculptures, and antiques. The goal of a curator is to tell a story, or perhaps to create an environment that communicates a narrative. Curation is a skill that is utilized based on the specific material or media being organized. In the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Professor and MOMA Curator Barry Bergdoll (1998), stated that “The art of curating historical exhibitions is young, and if it is to be vital as a medium of scholarship as well as communication, it must remain in a continual state of inventing itself (1998:257).” He argued that curation is kind of authorship because “arguments and insights are made with objects and images rather than primarily with words but also because collaboration is an inherent aspect of the process from conception to installation.” (1998:257) Similarly, in the digital environment, curation requires a thoughtful process of aggregating digital material, and in turn, requires the need to address the negotiation between content and display (Bergdoll, 1998). The digital online curation software, Storify, does just that: enabling research in the process of aggregating materials and allowing the user to consider the relationship between the content found and the shape the story takes throughout the narrative. Curating antiques is a finite process, the materials exist and can be completely cataloged for future organization. In the digital environment, material and content are infinite, constantly created, remixed, and redesigned constantly (Lessig, 2008). Social media’s impact on information is a flow of content that is scattered across over one billion users who are also inherently creators. Storify recognizes the overwhelming amount of content in its motto: Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices 91 “Storify helps making sense of what people post on social media. Our users curate the most important voices and turn them into stories” (Storify.com/about). Curation has been a boon to journalists and storytellers who can curate social media messages while allowing for editorial judgment on material, such as links and sources of news and information, based on the needs and interests of a particular audience (Briggs, 2013). Over the last several years, many news outlets have taken to curation as a way of organizing information for their audience. Sites like The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post, and The Daily Beast offer original content as well as organized articles from contributing authors and from around the web. Other sites, like Buzzfeed, work specifically on the model of curating information in nearly every posted article. When a news source uses curation as a service, it caters to their audience thereby bringing views to their site and encouraging audience interaction in the form of comments within the material. The act of curating creates not only the narrative, but also the conversation. To make sense of the avalanche of data provided by users blogging, tweeting, and commenting, a strong narrative is necessary to communicate and organize a story. A well-researched story requires discovering material from multiple media outlets as well as the increased diversity in breadth and scope that social media provide. Social media has not only provided an additional outlet for news reporters and commentators, but has also been an additional source of information for traditional media. Researching using social media becomes an act of responsible news literacy. As Renee Hobbs explained in her Digital and Media Literacy Knight Foundation Report (2010) “people need to have a good understanding of how knowledge is constructed and how it represents reality and articulates a point of view” (2010:viii). In a breaking news environment, a curator can be just as responsible for information gathering as a traditional media outlet. When sources such as Reddit rapidly aggregate available material, many online users find their data to be of a higher value than the slower paced verified news outlet. The online curator should understand that online user-based information is unfiltered and potentially heavily biased. This possibility offers the information curator the ability to curate multiple points of view to offer a well-rounded narrative to an ongoing event or theme. To return to a strong example, as in the case of the large theme of “income inequality,” the curator has to decide what approach to take their narrative. The issue is a hotly debated, very partisan topic. To truly inform an audience, approaching the topic from one point of view will not complete the story. The act of curating must be approached from an inherently balanced point of view and data has to be aggregated using specific search terms. Using terms as vague as “income inequality” or “Occupy Wall Street” may yield thousands of results ranging from supporters of the Occupy Movement to information claiming to debunk the movement altogether. The method of research should be focused on a point of view and time should be taken to fully understand a point of view. 92 Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices Curation and civic engagement The 2008 election between Barack Obama and John McCain marked the first election in United States history that was arguably directly influenced by manyto-many collaborative social media technologies. The major social media sites, which are Facebook, Twitter, Flicker, and YouTube, were not available before the election of 2004 the audience relied on traditional media to supply the narrative of the contest. In 2008, there was an incredible turnout of younger people and minorities, many who voted for the first time (Hesseldahl, et al., 2008). Facebook turned out to be the most valuable tool of the 2008 election season. Many users posted that they had voted by checking off a box on the site. The social atmosphere of Facebook caused users to encourage their peers to go out and do the same. Meanwhile, Twitter acted as the virtual watercooler for conversations both nationally and internationally on the topic of the election (Hesseldahl, et al., 2008). Social media across several sites provided information updates and a place to discuss the election process. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, almost one in five online users used social media during the 2008 election season to post their opinions or provide additional information (Smith, 2009). Furthermore, two-thirds of younger voters who used social media during the campaign season took part in some sort of political activity (Smith, 2009). In the years leading up to Barack Obama’s second term, social media has grown exponentially. Social media users made up only one third of Internet users in 2008; this number has grown larger than two thirds the online population in 2012 (Smith, 2013). The Pew Internet and American Life Project’s study on Civic Engagement in the Digital Age found that while a large part of the population takes part in a civic groups or activities offline, almost an equal number participated in a civic action using online methods, specifically social media like Facebook or Twitter (Smith, 2013). Engaging in civic matters and finding information on a given political topic starts with the exploration of online content. In the digital landscape, educators of all levels and fields have to responsibly negotiate the online lives and digital environments of their students and aid them in critical inquiry, analysis, and evaluation (Jenkins, et al., 2009). As social media sites grow in their prominence as information outlets, the task of organizing information is paramount to learning. Just as a writer gathers information for research purposes, the online user gathers information to create an informed opinion. As well as the previously mentioned aggregation sites like Buzzfeed or The Huffington Post, many traditional media have integrated social media into their reporting technique. Reporters now routinely focus some research on how the online audience is reacting to a breaking news event. The downside is the possibility of weak sources, unverified information, or completely false information. In a study titled Truth, Lies and the Internet: A report into young people’s digital fluency, Jamie Bartlett and Carl Miller (2011) found that while there are now a more abundant sources of journalism and experts, there is also a Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices 93 possibility of discovering and collecting mistakes, mistruths, and misinformation. This trap is possible even to those with trained experience in media organization and discovery, as seen in the news reports following the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, 2013. In the days following the bombings, many Internet users who access Reddit and 4Chan participated in their own form of information gathering using only available information online. The users focused on several people they believed to be responsible for the bombings using only the clues available from publicly posted information. Unfortunately, much of the information aggregated resulted in false leads because it lacked official source information from the FBI or police data. While the information was short of official documentation however, the online tools provided amazing organizational capabilities without the need of one central organizing unit. Scholars have pointed to users having a shorter attention span and lack of devotion to linear text (Carr, 2010). While the Internet user may focus differently, the act of engaging civically is more possible. Social media is in constant evolution as the user base grows and information structures change. Hobbs (2011), explains that students and users of digital era need to have human curiosity, the ability to listen, seek diverse knowledge, and constantly share information. To become an informed user of the sea of digital information, the user is responsible for continually learning by seeking. Participating in information sharing creates a new media environment that is constantly being reshaped by the act of participation itself (Thomas and Brown, 2011). As users grow more accustomed to seeking information online in order to learn more about a given subject, the act of the user as data expert is growing. Almost half of all social media users decided to learn more about political or social issues as result of something they had found on a social media site (Smith, 2013). The value of dispersed information that is found on a social media feed leads to the inevitable possibility that another user may have the most valuable information available on any given topic (Thomas and Brown, 2011). Becoming an information expert takes guidance and understanding of the new digital environment. To become a trusted source of information, the digital tools available online offer an opportunity to enhance the top-down information model that traditional media supply and reorganize the information into valuable stories. A social media researcher performs the tasks of gathering the data as well as narrating it for the intended audience who may be seeking alternative information to what is available. The Storify software, with its ability to annotate traditional news media and include the social media conversation from several social media sites, offers the possibility of advanced civic awareness and engagement. Storify Storify, a free, open source social curation platform, uses advanced algorithms to explore information from traditional media to any public social media post 94 Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices with the intention the curator should share their story for viewership (Figure 6.2). The term “storify” is traditional newsroom slang for adding color and detail to a fact based story. The software allows the user to do this through its built in guidelines. Figure 6.2 From Storify.com Many traditional news outlets have hired social media coordinators and reporters to their team in the past several years. Their job is to report on social media stories for their respective outlets. On the front page of Storify, a graphic of featured users shows ABC News, CNN, and The Guardian to encourage users to treat this platform professionally (Figure 6.3). Figure 6.3 From Storify.com To use Storify, user can sign in with their Facebook account, Twitter account, or the standard online method of email logins. The user is encouraged to first collect the data for the narrative and then construct the story. As this chapter is about the methods of curating material, we suggest a slightly different approach. First and foremost, the software opens with a screen that resembles a newspaper setup. The Storify editor asks the user to input a headline and a subtitle in order to begin. On the right side of the Storify editor, the search system is located (Figure 6.4). Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices 95 Figure 6.4 From Storify.com The Storify search system is a built in search tool that works on keyword searches. It provides search capabilities for its own breaking news as well as searches on Google and Google News and images. Considering the fact that many breaking news stories are supplemented by user generated content and actual news reporters using services like Twitter, Storify also provides access to the major social media outlets like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, Tumblr, Soundcloud, and Instagram. In many cases, the user has to sign into their account through Storify in order to access the social media database that some of these sources provide. The following is a method of using Storify as a practical research tool rather than simply collecting data and narrating the results. Practical use of Storify 96 Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices In the process of creating a Storify, the researcher should consider their specific story as a thesis before the onset of curating. A headline should be created as a title and the subtitle should offer a specific thesis statement that allows the reader to understand the point of view of the author/narrator. With that in mind, the curator can properly approach the story and frame their approach. Using Storify’s breadth of access, we recommend that the researcher focus specifically on keywords that support the framing of their story. For example, a quality story on “income inequality” may focus on Occupy Wall Street or on the problems with government entitlement systems. With either of these approaches, the curator should remain as objective as possible in their research (Figure 6.5). Figure 6.5 From Storify.com The curator should begin by adding supporting information in their aggregation as well as background narrative in order to properly inform the reader of the Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices 97 topic at hand. Using the built in Google News search, the user should locate articles and information that offer the most verified and supportive information to any given subject. Careful attention and reading of the resulting articles are necessary as the author may discover new points of focus for their aggregation in the process of inquiry. It is important to note that the algorithm that Storify employs in the search will result in sources with the most amount of verified information, therefore newspapers of record such as the New York Times or The Guardian often appear near the top of the results. In the process of aggregating and organizing, the researcher should narrow their results through the keywords discovered in their initial research with the focus on their thesis in mind. If the story is focused on entitlement loopholes, the first search should focus on a wide based search result like “Occupy Wall Street” and continue with a Boolean search approach to focus the topic. (i.e: ‘Occupy Wall Street’ + Welfare). The many voices of social media also play an integral role to online curation. While the multiple voices of the online audience are the experts of their own opinion, the researcher should understand that a Storify story is not complete without the crowd participation into a narrative arc. The opinions, in the form of text and visuals, make up the authenticity of the story. The researcher is responsible for creating a narrative that includes the voices of the online crowd while also maintaining context for vibrant opinions versus nuanced reporting, dialog, or debate. For partisan issues like income inequality, gun control, or abortion, the researcher is susceptible to a range of highly animated voices.. In order to support a point a view, the researcher should focus on multiple search terms that focus their point but support it with actual evidence regardless of personal opinion. A high quality Storify displays a multitude of voices that develop the narrative with substantial and knowledgeable points of view. The narrative the researcher is creating gains value by increasing the conversation with posts by users who seem to have firsthand knowledge of the story, are on location, or may be experts who utilize social media to spread their information. The researcher should consider the Storify they are creating to be as important as a national media outlet. The Social Media Research Narrative Based on recent Facebook and Weibo statistics (Tam, 2013; Montlake, 2013), social media users make up over 15% of the world’s population. While many more people have access to the World Wide Web, those who have access to social media share in a democracy of participation that allows them to add digital value to offline events. Creating a research paper on any topic before the advent of social media was limited to the extant information that had been published in accessible documents such as newspapers, periodicals, books, journals, and possibly dissertations. The researchers task of creating a narrative from the available information was a process of curating and culling pertinent to 98 Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices their topic. The narrative created was mostly the curated and paraphrased information in a linear fashion. Paraphrasing existing documents is the most valuable process of creating a narrative because the ability to successfully paraphrase means to have a comprehension of the material (Kennedy, Kennedy, and Smith, 2004). In the social media research environment, extant online information is in overabundance. Storify took this into consideration with a tool they call the “Collection Bookmarklet” that permits the curator to “clip” web-based information and data into Storify’s collection in the user’s account. These articles, photos, tweets, or anything else that has been clipped can be kept for future use in a story, or just as a bookmark. A Storify is not just a collection of found articles and social media posts, it is a well-articulated, thought-provoking construct that is both readable and educational. The goal of a fulfilling Storify is to inform the reader by narrating a set curated articles on the topic, displaying photographs from Twitter, Flickr, and Instagram, and showing social media input from users at large from Facebook posts to Tweets to audio files from SoundCloud. Storify has additional tools to help create the narrative of the story. If the curator were to add material to the timeline while searching through various outlets, the sort feature (Figure 6.6) lines up all of the content in the story either from the oldest source to the newest or vice versa. After the order is established, the text can be added in between each source material to add depth, paraphrasing, and transitions to the findings (Figure 6.7). Figure 6.6 From Storify.com Figure 6.7 From Storify.com Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices 99 The Storify curation software eschews plagiarism. The curator is encouraged to consider each article or social media post a primary source. As the researcher is accountable for transparency and accountability, the reader may find all the original locations of the material by simply clicking on the link or photograph. The writer is encouraged to pull quotes from the article as an annotation to the information, but the possibility of a direct quote is redundant as the material is readily available and visible on the timeline. “Exploding” news information Breaking news information can lead to an influx of information available instantaneously. The twenty-four-hour news cycle allows for mainstream media to continually stay on air and develop the story. On the night of May 1st, 2011, news channels turned their attention towards a podium in the White House awaiting an “Urgent Announcement” from President Barack Obama. While yet to be confirmed by the president, the Internet and news media were already talking about the killing of Osama bin Laden. Information from verified media, amateur accounts, and first-hand accounts of the story were “exploding” online. Researcher Alex Leavitt posted on Twitter the night of the breaking news: “What do we call this news phenomenon? It’s not ‘saw it on the news late last night.’ It’s more like ‘saw the news explode online’ (Leavitt, May 1, 2011).” Storify’s aggregating software allows for a copy to be made of the Twitter posts dragged into the timeline which allows the software to act as an archiving device. Therefore, posts made by Twitter users that may be later deleted are backed up on the curators Storify. In a breaking news event, the curator can be tasked with organizing varying information that is released during a breaking news event. While there was little confusion about the actual story that was being released during the night of the bin Laden announcement, this may not be the case for other such breaking news events. In the aftermath of the Sandy Hook shooting on December 14th, 2012, news reporters utilized to Storify to aggregate social media posts from citizens responding to the horrible events as well as the posts made by those involved. Canoe News, Canadian Online Explorer, utilized Storify to aggregate the Twitter posts from Sandy Hook Elementary’s principal Dawn Hochsprung. The Storify titled “Scenes from Sandy Hook in happier times (2012)” states: A shooter opened fire at Sandy Hook School in Newtown, Connecticut leaving several dead, according to reports. The woman listed as principal on the school’s staff directory, Dawn Hochsprung, appears to be an active Twitter user. Here are a few of her posts this school year (http://storify.com/CanoeNews/scenes-fromsandy-hook-school-newtown-ct). The Storify platform in this case goes beyond traditional news reporting to add supplemental value to a tragic news report. The user can curate social media to add civic value to an ongoing and developing story. 100 Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices Large scale stories, especially those where social media users are direct witnesses, offer the curators dozens of different angles to research a story. For example, when Hurricane Sandy swept along the entire East Coast of the United States during the last week of October 2012, stories relating to mass flooding, wind destruction, and the large scale damage to the New Jersey and Long Island shoreline were created. People in the respective locations were first hand witnesses to the ongoing disaster, posting updates as they were developing. Social media storytellers were able to aggregate the news articles from reporters on the scene and add depth with social media evidence in both pictures and posts from people in the vicinity. For stories that do not happen to develop at a very rapid pace, the researcher can become the investigative journalist, piecing together evidence of a story’s outcome. When Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o’s alleged girlfriend passed away, there became significant evidence that she may have never existed. The story tellers can approach the subject of this story as how the audience reacted to the possibility of Te’o as an unfortunate victim of a prank or they may approach the story as a sleuth to discover whether the college football player may have been in on the joke. Reinforcing academic sourcing Storify can be used to teach the value of source material by focusing on how messages are spread about certain topics. The approach in a source assignment would be to approach a hot button issue or topic that is highly partisan in politics and beliefs such as gun control, pro-life/pro-choice, or climate change and task the curator with telling a story with a point of view from one side or the other. The advanced task would be to assign two separate curations of the story with the same thesis point, but one story would only be allowed to find source material from legitimate sources and verified information while the other curation would only be from amateur and user generated source material. The goal of this assignment is to focus on the importance of source material. The curator may find completely different results from mainstream media than the results of amateur voices and opinions. This curation experiment can lead to discussions on the importance of source information (Mihailidis & Cohen, 2013): • How does authority affect storytelling? • How are mainstream media reports different than user-generated reports? • Does social media information have value in a reporting atmosphere? • When is a story complete? • What is the process of vetting credible information? In the changing environment of media information, the value of social media voices may have more substantial value than mainstream media reporting. This Conducting Research Utilizing Social Media: Best Practices 101 approach to curation could lead to an ongoing conversation regarding how storytellers navigate the immense amount of information available online. Conclusion In conclusion, narrative storytelling in the digital present requires a researcher with a handle on curating information to benefit readers. The researcher needs to be able to aggregate information on a given topic, understand, analyze, and evaluate a subject, and narrate the information gathered. Several online tools offer the researcher possibilities of creating a narrative for the reader. While many tools analyze data, they leave much out for narrative storytelling. The value of information is greatly enhanced by the aspect of the story. Therefore, the authors believe that Storify offers the most robust search, aggregation, organization, and narrative properties in the social media environment. Journalists, educators, and students alike can benefit from Storify by using it to search various social media like Twitter or Instagram to creating a narrative by stringing together traditional news stories from various media outlets. Storify empowers the user to “make the web tell stories” and potentially become a information source online. 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