Did you know that every second ~6,000 tweets and six new Facebook profiles are published on the Web? Add to that the 50 billion photos shared on Instagram since its launch in 2010; which results in an ever growing social web.
The conclusion is inevitable: today, social media are unavoidable and constitute an integral part of our daily lives and even our culture. As vectors of a large amount of content, they are rich in potential and represent a non-negligible source of information for many researchers in fields as vast as history, political science, linguistics, sociology, and information and computer science.
KBR has launched the BESOCIAL project, a two-year project that aims to set up a sustainable strategy for archiving and preserving social media in Belgium.
The challenge is equally complex as the data: social media are challenging from the point of view of conservation, preservation and accessibility. This is due to their uniqueness and ephemeral nature in particular.
Initially, the objective is to archive the social media content related to certain Belgian events selected during the project, as well as the social media content related to KBR’s newspaper collections.
It is envisioned to explore how this unpublished data can be opened up for use. The collections of social media content will also constitute an interesting complement to the websites archived during PROMISE research project (2017-2019).
The BESOCIAL project was presented during the last International Internet Preservation Consortium (IIPC) Research Speaker Series Webinarin August 2020:
The BESOCIAL project, financed by Belspo BRAIN-be, is the result of a collaboration between KBR and:
This fruitful cooperation between a federal institution and three Belgian universities thus emphasises the importance of interdisciplinarity in the context of a complex project in which technical, operational and legal aspects are at play.
Contact person: Jessica Pranger (jessica.pranger@kbr.be