Earlier this year, the Smithsonian Women’s Committee awarded a one-year grant to Smithsonian Libraries (SIL) to build online exhibitions to showcase the scientific and historical contributions of Women and Latino naturalists and illustrators. The project, entitled Notable Women and Latinos in Natural History, will draw from content in the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) and use the Biodiversity Library Exhibition (BLE) platform developed by BHL Europe.

As part of this project, SIL hosted a workshop on the BLE platform on 22-26 September 2014.

Workshop participants, clockwise from left foreground: Laurel Byrnes, Bianca Crowley, Jiri Frank, and Adriana Marroquin

On September 22, BHL Program Manager Carolyn Sheffield kicked off the meeting with an introduction to the Notable Women and Latinos project and an overview of the goals for the week.  Jiři Frank, of the National Museum of Prague and a developer of the BLE, presented an overview of the platform and then provided an in-depth demonstration of how to design exhibits in BLE.

Over the next three days, Jiři led a hands-on workshop that provided an opportunity for the project’s Digital Exhibition Coordinators, Adriana Marroquin and Laurel Byrnes, to build experience working directly in BLE. BHL staff, including Grace Costantino, Bianca Crowley, and Joel Richard, also attended portions of the workshop to gain familiarity with the platform.

All in all, it was a highly successful workshop with Adriana and Laurel creating preliminary versions of the exhibitions that they will build for the Smithsonian Women’s Committee project. On the last day of the workshop, SIL staff were invited to attend a demonstration of the BLE platform and to provide feedback on the initial designs that were compiled over the last couple of days. Both Adriana and Laurel received valuable feedback and there was some great discussion at the end. At least one attendee expressed interest in contributing additional content to existing exhibits or creating new ones.

We extend a big thank you to Jiři Frank for lending all of his time and experience to making the workshop a great success and kudos to Adriana and Laurel on the impressive progress that they made over the course of the week! We are also very grateful for the support from the Smithsonian Women’s Committee that made this possible, and we look forward to seeing these digital exhibitions take shape over the next couple of months!

How can data analysis help us improve our social media activities?

This was the fundamental question BHL’s Outreach and Communication Manager, Grace Costantino, sought to address during her two-day meeting with Ryerson University’s Social Media Lab, Sept. 29-30, 2014. As co-participants in the Mining Biodiversity Digging Into Data project, BHL has been collaborating virtually with Dr. Anatoliy Gruzd, the Lab’s Director, since early 2014. The Social Media and Society 2014 conference, organized by the Lab, offered an ideal opportunity for Ms. Costantino and Dr. Gruzd to meet in person and explore BHL’s social network using tools developed by the Lab.

Analyzing BHL’s Twitter Network via Netlytic

The Social Media Lab studies how social media and web 2.0 technologies affect society, communication, and information dissemination. The research team has developed several tools to analyze and visualize social networks. One such tool, Netlytic, is a free cloud-based app that uses public APIs to analyze social media conversations to help community managers discover trending topics, growth, conversation reach, and influential participants. Current supported datasources include Twitter, Facebook, groups and pages, Instagram posts and YouTube comments.

During the meeting, Ms. Costantino and Dr. Gruzd used Netlytic to analyze BHL’s Twitter network, capturing conversations originated by or occurring about BHL. Since analysis was just initiated, Twitter API limitations restricted data capture to conversation occurring on or after 9/22/2014.

Netlytic reports uncover popular words within conversations, which can be grouped to display popular topics. They also present the entire network as a visualized cluster that displays the connections and conversations among participants.

Keyword analysis revealed that, not surprisingly, “biodiversity” and “species” were two of the most popular words occurring in recent BHL-related conversations. Also not surprising were the terms “open access” and “smsociety14” (the hashtag for the Social Media and Society conference). Other popular words, however, include “beer,” “birds,” and “images.” Netlytic allows you to delve deeper into each word occurrence, listing the related tweets. An investigation of “beer” revealed that Oktoberfest is a popular topic among people following or discussing BHL content. “Images” confirmed what our observational analysis already told us – people love our illustrations (evidenced by the overwhelming success of Flickr).

Popular words in tweets from the BHL Twitter network.

The appearance of “birds” might suggest that we have more bird-lovers among our followers. However, review of the related tweets showed that we published a good deal of material about birds over the past week and a half, including our Birds of Paradise blog post, some tweets about Florence Bailey’s bird books, and a retweet of PenAndFeather’s post on BHL’s Album de Aves Amazonicas.

Twitter networks posting the most tweets within our BHL network of tweets from or about BHL.

An analysis of the participants in our network revealed that 373 Twitter accounts (represented as nodes in the visualization) have posted content about us since 9/22/2014, with 858 “ties” (or links between participants, meaning that they engaged in some sort of interaction with each other about BHL, through either @mentions, @replies, or retweets).

Visualization of the BHL twitter network.

A deeper analysis of the network uncovers who is talking to whom and what they’re talking about. The network visualization is based on clusters, and nodes within the cluster are linked to other nodes via lines that indicate interactions. A single line from one node to another represents a one-sided conversation, i.e. one account tweeted a message that includes a mention of the connected account. When nodes are looped together (a line connects one node, and in turn that node is connected back to the first with another line), this indicates dialogue between the nodes. One account mentions another, and that account in turn mentions the first. These lines can either have an indegree or outdegree centrality value. If an outdegree value, it means that the selected node (i.e. Twitter account) mentioned the connected node. Indegree indicates that the selected node was mentioned by the connected account.

For instance, BHL’s node has a strong indegree centrality, meaning that we are mentioned in other people’s tweets more often than we mention other people in a tweet. During this period, we were mentioned by 343 Twitter users. This is largely accounted for by retweets. Our node operates largely on a broadcasting model, where we publish information that is disseminated by others via retweets. This is obvious visually as the “BioDivLibrary” dot is larger than the surrounding dots in the image below, and in general all nodes tie back to ours. However, we mentioned 82 different Twitter accounts as well during this time period, indicating that we are engaging in dialogue with our users regularly.

Network of Tweets published by us or including our handle.

The closer a node is to the more concentrated part of the cluster, the more connections it has within the network, or the more people within the network that the user is interacting with. Nodes stretching far outside the hub of the network often only have a single tie within the cluster, meaning they are not highly engaged in our community.

Spike accounted for by popular “International Coffee Day” and “Fashionista” tweets.

Netlytic is also useful for discovering conversations occurring about BHL that we might be unaware of. All of the nodes within the main group of clusters include either @BioDivLibrary, “Biodiversity Heritage Library,” or #BHLib in the tweet. These are conservations that we can easily track and follow via Twitter. However, the @BiodiversityNew network includes interactions among users that don’t include #BHLib, @BioDivLibrary, or “Biodiversity Heritage Library” in their tweets. Instead, they include links that resolve back to our blog posts. There is no easy way to discover this conversation in Twitter, but thanks to Netlytic, we can not only find it but engage with the participants in that node and encourage them to follow us.

@BiodiversityNew network involving posts resolving back to the BHL blog

So What?

A community manager can spend hours (days!) analyzing a network, discovering users and related conversations. But how can this help us improve our social media efforts?

1. Trending vs. Long-Term Analysis: Since we’ve only recently started tracking BHL’s Twitter via Netlytic, we have a limited range of data available for analysis. However, the longer we track our network, the more data we will have to work with. This will allow us to get a more accurate picture of our network and answer questions that require longitudinal study and long-range data.
   1. Who are all the players interacting with us? Some users who might regularly engage with us may not have been active during the period analyzed, and thus are not captured as part of our network.
   2. What topics are consistently popular among our users? Terms like “beer” were popular now because of Oktoberfest, but likely will not remain so.
   3. What is the true size of our network, and is it showing growth? Furthermore, when we see rapid growth, we can investigate the content we published and the most active users in our network during that period to discover what and who is influential in regards to our growth.
   4. However, it is still useful to capture trends so that we can publish event-specific, time-relevant content. Netlytic allows you to limit your analysis to a particular time period, allowing us to see what topics we should be publishing about now (based on trends) vs. regularly (based on longitudinal study).
2. Audience-Informed Content: In general, an analysis of popular keywords allows us to see what resonates most with our users. This will allow us to better craft our posts to satisfy the appetite of our network.
3. Is our Community Stable and Loyal? Analyzing the users that engage with us over time can help us see not only whether we see new users participating (showing network growth), but whether existing users continue to interact with us. We want to grow a stable, dedicated community that consistently helps to promote our content. If we do not see strong follower loyalty, we will need to compare our content and tone to those popular among our users and tweak our strategies accordingly.
4. Discover New Conversations and Communities: As explained earlier, Netlytic can help us discover conversations occurring about us that we are otherwise unaware of. We can also identify new communities with an interest in our material but as yet unengaged with our brand. Engaging in these conversations and networks will help us grow our audience.
5. Discover Influencers and Collaborators: Network analysis can also help us see which users are most connected with other users, particularly with a strong inbound centrality. These users are reaching many other users and successfully inspiring engagement. These are important relationships for us to cultivate as these individuals may represent our most influential advocates. BHL also actively collaborates with other nodes. Network analysis will help us see whether these collaborations are reaching new and expanding audiences. We should increase collaborations with those demonstrating the greatest growth and connections. For those lacking such indicators, it may be appropriate to shift effort elsewhere.
6. Convert Outliers to Champions: As mentioned, nodes furthest removed from a network’s concentrated center are least-engaged in the community but have demonstrated interest in our content. These users may also represent people with access to communities we do not yet engage with. We should strategically engage with select users in these categories to encourage further investment in our community, which may lead to advocates in new communities.
7. Less Broadcasting, more Conversation: The Social Media and Society Conference revealed that science-related Twitter accounts often operate on a broadcasting model. They are disseminators of information, but not strong facilitators of dialogue. Within the BHL network, we see a bias towards broadcasting, but many looped ties were present, indicating that we are actively engaging with our users. One of our outreach goals is to foster and promote a dialogue among ourselves, researchers, librarians, citizen scientists, and bioinfomaticians. This requires us to engage with more users, using the strategies outlined above. Continual analysis of our network will reveal if we are being successful and indicate when new strategies are necessary.

It’s a brave new world of social media analysis. Emerging tools allow us to discover our networks, engage with our users, and refine our strategies like never before. As BHL continues to collaborate with The Social Media Lab and analyze our social networks (Twitter is just the beginning), we will improve our ability to tell people why biodiversity is unbelievably awesome!

The BHL Outreach and Communication Manager position, and this meeting attendance, are made possible in part through funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (Grant number LG-00-14-0032-14).

Louis Agassiz Fuertes. The Osprey. v. 1 (1896-97). http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/8767127

The artwork of Puerto Rican-American Louis Agassiz Fuertes has been featured a few times before on the BHL blog. His paintings are beautiful and eye-catching, and always a treat to visit. Through titles available in BHL, we can even see the evolution of Fuertes’s career— from his earliest professional work to his last.

The Ithaca-born ornithologist and artist often drew as a young child, sketching domestic animals and wild birds alike. Earliest recording of his painting birds was at the age of 14 when he was determined to capture the unusual beak of a Red Crossbill. At a young age, his work started to garner him some notoriety with professors at Cornell and the local community, even resulting in an exhibit hosted by the local Christian Association. By 17 he’d even become an Associate Member of the American Ornithologists Union.

However, when he entered Cornell University, Fuertes’s career was still in question. At the time there weren’t any courses in ornithology at Cornell, and his father (despite urgings from his peers) at first did not see how his son’s artistic leanings could provide a suitable life. As a result, Fuertes took courses in architecture.

It was a chance meeting that changed everything. On a trip to Washington, D.C. with the Cornell University Glee Club, Fuertes met with a friend’s uncle. This uncle just happened to be ornithologist Elliot Coues, a founding member of the American Ornithologists Union.

Nest of Western Gnatcatcher. A-Birding on a Bronco. (1896) http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/12789735

Coues recognized Fuertes’s potential, and provided him with advice and material support to encourage his scientific and artistic pursuits. It was clear Fuertes was to become a professional painter of birds, and after college he studied under naturalist and artist Abbott H. Thayer. The two would become quite close, even so far as considering one another family.

Some of Fuertes’s earliest artwork can be found in publications for Cornell University. However his first professional illustrations were printed in A-birding on a Bronco (1896) by Florence Merriam Bailey, published just one year before Fuertes graduated from Cornell. The pen-and-ink drawings mark the start of a career that would eventually have Fuertes in high demand. Although considered his early works, it is clear Fuertes’s youthful sketching had paid off, resulting in a well-developed style demonstrated in detailed images of birds, their nests, and the surrounding flora.

The Little Lover. A-Birding on a Bronco. (1896) http://biodiversitylibrary.org/page/12789693

It’s no surprise that Coues would write to The Osprey to note: “[My] examination of a great many of his designs, both in black-and-white and in natural colors, makes me think Mr. Fuertes the most promising young artist of birds now living, and one whose work already places him in the very first rank.”

It’s an interesting look at the early period of Fuertes’s thirty-year career, during which he would become, not just a prolific artist, but a well-liked and admired colleague and professor. His contemporaries would note his kind, light-hearted nature, and his lectures at Cornell would garner a full house at attention. In the tradition of 19th-century professors who considered themselves poets, Albert W. Smith would recite a memorial poem about Fuertes wherein he says, “under touches of his magic brush,/The canvass [sic] came alive.” Smith would go on to say:

All children knew at once he was their friend;
All men and women felt his lasting charm.
He loved all lovely things that love men’s hearts;
And when he found new beauty, lo, he turned
To share it with some friend.

His kind nature would extend to how he treated his specimens, one account noting how he would stroke and coo at a recently shot bird. This love of birds and sympathetic nature are often repeated in articles and obituaries written about him.

In the end Louis shared the natural beauty of the world not just with those around him, but with the general public who had a growing interest in the natural world. His final contributions were the paintings for Album of Abyssinian Birds and Mammals (1930), the originals of which managed to survive unscathed in the car accident which killed Fuertes in 1927. Many publications which feature Fuertes’s artwork remain available to the public, dozens of which are offered through the BHL.

This blog post is a preview of two upcoming Biodiversity Library Exhibitions on women naturalists, and Latino natural history. The exhibitions are sponsored by the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, and will highlight several women and Latino naturalists represented in the BHL collection.