Not necessarily completely precise. For example,it can be doable that some individuals found themselves unable to attend a conference but still seem on a list of delegates; other people may have registered late and don’t appear on such a list; however other individuals may possibly have requested to not have their names seem on a public list. Furthermore,not all participants attend all offered sessions of a conference. Nonetheless,despite the fact that there is certainly an inevitable uncertainty inside the metric,the item of conference participants and conference duration does look to provide a reasonable measure of your size of an occasion. Luckily,as will be seen in “Results” section,an uncertainty in participant number as big as (which might be viewed as being unduly pessimistic) turns out to not affect the conclusions. The conferences within this sample ranged in size from participants at one particular intense to participants at the other. An analysis showed no partnership between the amount of participants plus the amount of twitter activity.Conference hashtagsTwo applications were written to harvest tweets that contained a conference hashtag or related keyword: a single program utilized a Search API,the other a Streaming API. The latter API keeps a persistent http connection open; the former needs the polling of a rest endpoint,but is possibly better suited for singular searches. Twitter itself states that the Search API isn’t a complete index of all tweets,and investigation by GonzalezBailon et al. shows that the Search API “overrepresents the a lot more central customers and will not supply an precise picture of peripheral activity”. Nevertheless,in initial tests aimed at harvesting conferencebased tweets,the program primarily based on the Search API was discovered to be far more robust. In certain,for conferences exactly where Twitter activity was low,the Streaming API harvested fewer tweets (due mainly to timeout challenges) than the Search API. Alternatively,every single tweet identified by the Streaming API was also identified by the Search API. Hence,the decision was produced to harvest conference tweets applying the Search API. Some conference delegates may possibly opt for to tweet from the event devoid of working with a hashtag or keyword,and such contenteven if it had been straight relevant for the conferencewould be invisible to the harvesting system. By the identical token,even so,precisely the same content material will be difficult to identify for other users. It is likely,consequently,that the amount of such untagged tweets is going to be smaller in comparison with the quantity labelled with a conference hashtag. It should also be noted that there is certainly degeneracy amongst hashtag usage: distinct conferences legitimately employ the identical hashtag. So that you can minimise the likelihood of harvesting inappropriate tweets,the search on a specific hashtag or keyword was restricted for the dates on which the relevant conference was held. By way of example,the hashtag #isb was employed by a conference organised by the International Society of Biomechanics but in addition for one organised by the International Society of Bassists (and fairly possibly by MedChemExpress EPZ031686 various other societies); limiting the search for the dates on which conferences were held was a way of minimising this impact,at PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21383499 the expense of missing out on pre and postconference tweets. There were also occasions on which the usage of a hashtag was contested during an event. One example is,#pathways would happen to be a reputable hashtag for probably the most Twitteractive conferences within this sample,“Pathways Towards Habitable PlanetsII”. Certainly,this particular hashtag was.