This slide deck accompanies a paper written for Museums and the Web 2014 in Baltimore. The paper is here: http://mw2014.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/the-epiphany-project-discovering-the-intrinsic-value-of-museums-by-analysing-social-media/ and describes the lead-in to the project. The slides show the initial findings from the first three months of project development work, during which data from Twitter about a specific museum (Belper Mill) was captured and put in a Neo4J Graph Database. The slides will be very hard to follow without the notes, which don't seem to be happening on SlideShare at the moment, but if you download the presentation and view it in Powerpoint, you ought to be able to get more of an idea what this is all about.

1. The Epiphany Project – short demo
Longitudinal analysis of Twitter data
using a graph database
David Gerrard, Dr Ann O’Brien &
Professor Thomas Jackson
4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk

2. Graph databases
• Show of hands:
– Who is familiar with Graph DBs?
• In a nutshell:
– A database in which the relationships
between things are first class citizens
– Organises data into Directed Graphs
4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk

3. 4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk
Name Twitter Name # Followers
Belper Mill @BelperMill 503
Cromford Mills @CromfordMills 2416
Darley Abbey @DarleyAbbey 1163
Derby Museums @DerbyMuseums 2875
Derby Silk Mill @DerbySilkMill 2448
Derwent Valley Mills @DVMillsWHS 2336
John Smedley @JohnSmedley 4008
Masson Mills @Masson_Mills 4
Willersley Castle @WillersleyHotel 432

4. 4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk
Twitter
API
Client
TweetInvi
https://tweetinvi.codeplex.com/
Visualisation
Graph
database
Neo4J
http://www.neo4j.org/
Neo4JClient
http://hg.readify.net/neo4jclient/overview
1
2Console
App
3
4 5
6 7
8
Release 1 system

5. 4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk

6. 4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk

7. 4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk

8. 4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk

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10. 4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk

11. 4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk

12. 4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk

13. 4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk
Instrumental value Intrinsic value
Where Computational Social Science fits
e.g. Travers (2006)
Museums and Galleries
in Britain
e.g. Museums Association (2012)
Museums 2020 Public Perceptions of
and Attitudes to the Purposes of
Museums in society
Computational Social Science
Uses Internet data to examine
human behaviour.
(Potentially) enables near-real time
analysis of high-volumes of
“medium-fidelity” information.

14. 4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk
People
Visit museums
Follow museums
and write about
experiences using…
Social media
Enable social
networks and
content publication
Epiphany system
API
Client
Finds
followers
and their
blogs from
Focused
web
crawler
Pass
URLs
to
Harvests
content
from
Data stores
Graph
database
Business
intelligence
Links
back
to
Logic / rules
Visual-
isation
Content
analyser
Pass
content
to
Museums
Display objects
Hold exhibitions
Inspire…
Architectural vision

15. I’m looking for…
• Case studies:
– I need this research to be useful…
– … so I need to work with museums
• More funding:
– Current UK Arts and Humanities Research
Council funding ends Sept 2015
– There is more than a PhD here
4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk

16. @EpiphanyLboro
4th April 2014@EpiphanyLboro d.m.gerrard@lboro.ac.uk