Okay, so as of my last post, my research question was: I am studying Twitter responses to the question “what is art” in order to understand how art impacts people’s daily lives so that there is a greater understanding of the public appreciation and perception of art. Potentially this research could assist curators and social media professionals at galleries and museums to develop methods of outreach, educational tools, and programming for their spaces.

And my argument was: 1. Twitter users have few but varied interactions with art day-to-day. 2. Most Twitter users implementing the hashtag #art do so quite frequently. 3. Common users of the hashtag #art are artists peddling their work, or organizations with an agenda, not average users. 4. Complications would include representation of users who do not use the hashtag #art. 5. When people reference art on the internet, it is generally for promotional reasons, and not an expression of discovery or appreciation.

As of now, I am still moving in this direction, but I’ve hit a few roadblocks. The first is that the Twitter Archiver tool that we learned to use in class is only free for one use. Meaning, when I ran my test fetch on November 2nd of all posts with the hashtag #art, that was the one and only time I could perform that request. All further research will either need to be completed manually, or with that test data set.

Additionally, my idea to create a kind of heat map of the world based on where the hashtag was used and the frequency, get somewhat impacted by this new, severely limited quantity of data. I was not really anticipiating this little to work with, so I might need to alter my final presentation of my data from a world map to something else, perhaps a language graph or image-based infographic detailing the user demographics. I definitely want to try to use Google Charts to develop my output, if possible.

Currently, that is as far as I’ve gotten. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, I will have come to terms with my lack of data and nailed down how I’m going to present what I’ve learned - if anything - to the class.