Not necessarily absolutely correct. As an example,it really is doable that a number of people found themselves unable to attend a conference but nonetheless appear on a list of delegates; others might have registered late and do not appear on such a list; but others might have requested not to have their names appear on a public list. Moreover,not all participants attend all out there sessions of a conference. Nevertheless,despite the fact that there is an inevitable uncertainty within the metric,the product of conference participants and conference duration does seem to supply a affordable measure of your size of an occasion. Thankfully,as is going to be noticed in “Results” section,an uncertainty in participant quantity as big as (which could possibly be viewed as becoming unduly pessimistic) turns out to not influence the conclusions. The conferences within this sample ranged in size from participants at a single extreme to participants at the other. An analysis showed no relationship amongst the amount of participants and the amount of twitter activity.Conference hashtagsTwo applications were written to harvest tweets that contained a conference hashtag or related keyword: a single system utilised a Search API,the other a Streaming API. The latter API keeps a persistent http connection open; the former demands the polling of a rest endpoint,but is probably far better suited for singular searches. Twitter itself states that the Search API isn’t a comprehensive index of all tweets,and analysis by GonzalezBailon et al. shows that the Search API “overrepresents the extra central customers and doesn’t offer an correct image of peripheral activity”. Nonetheless,in initial tests aimed at harvesting conferencebased tweets,the program based on the Search API was located to be much more robust. In particular,for conferences where Twitter activity was low,the Streaming API harvested fewer tweets (due mostly to timeout challenges) than the Search API. However,every tweet identified by the Streaming API was also identified by the Search API. As a result,the selection was created to harvest conference tweets utilizing the Search API. Some conference delegates may pick out to tweet from the event with no making use of a hashtag or keyword,and such contenteven if it have been directly relevant to the conferencewould be invisible to the harvesting program. By precisely the same token,on the other hand,the exact same content material will be tough to identify for other users. It’s likely,for that reason,that the amount of such untagged tweets might be tiny buy BMS-687453 compared to the number labelled having a conference hashtag. It should also be noted that there is degeneracy amongst hashtag usage: distinct conferences legitimately employ exactly the same hashtag. So that you can minimise the likelihood of harvesting inappropriate tweets,the search on a particular hashtag or keyword was restricted for the dates on which the relevant conference was held. For instance,the hashtag #isb was employed by a conference organised by the International Society of Biomechanics but additionally for one organised by the International Society of Bassists (and very possibly by several other societies); limiting the search towards the dates on which conferences have been held was a way of minimising this effect,at PubMed ID:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21383499 the expense of missing out on pre and postconference tweets. There have been also occasions on which the use of a hashtag was contested during an event. For example,#pathways would happen to be a legitimate hashtag for probably the most Twitteractive conferences within this sample,“Pathways Towards Habitable PlanetsII”. Indeed,this distinct hashtag was.