P.14 Glenn Becker (Center for Astrophysics | Harvard and Smithsonian)
The Road to a Science-Based Twitter Feed: Paving and White Lines with Software
Maintaining an up-to-date science-based Twitter feed is labor-intensive. Nothing can replace human authors, but given careful planning, and the establishment of justifiable criteria, software can encapsulate the information sources and communication principles of the intended feed, sort through and prioritize available options, and greatly ease the workflow for authors. This is especially helpful where resources are limited. At the Chandra Data Archive, we have leveraged the mission's existing archives of observational and bibliographical data to provide Twitter maintainers with tweet topic recommendations across numerous categories, along with crucial information about each item. Other tools make tracking the success of the feed easy. To make this work, we first thought hard about what the feed should feature, and tightened our inclusion criteria as we proceeded. We then designed software to isolate items of interest from the database and present it in an efficient yet engaging manner to Twitter staff. The hard work that created the Chandra archive is thus marshaled into a new interface with a new purpose.
