Not necessarily totally correct. One example is,it is possible that a number of people located themselves unable to attend a conference but nevertheless appear on a list of delegates; other people may well have registered late and do not seem on such a list; yet other folks may possibly have requested not to have their names appear on a public list. In addition,not all participants attend all accessible sessions of a conference. Nevertheless,though there’s an inevitable uncertainty in the metric,the item of conference participants and conference duration does look to supply a reasonable measure on the size of an occasion. Luckily,as might be noticed in “Results” section,an uncertainty in participant quantity as big as (which may be viewed as being unduly pessimistic) turns out not to impact the conclusions. The conferences within this sample ranged in size from participants at 1 intense to participants at the other. An evaluation showed no connection amongst the amount of participants and also the degree of twitter activity.Conference hashtagsTwo applications have been written to harvest tweets that contained a conference hashtag or connected keyword: 1 program applied a Search API,the other a Streaming API. The latter API keeps a persistent http connection open; the former calls for the polling of a rest endpoint,but is maybe greater suited for singular searches. Twitter itself states that the Search API will not be a complete index of all tweets,and investigation by GonzalezBailon et al. shows that the Search API “overrepresents the far more central users and doesn’t supply an correct picture of peripheral activity”. Nevertheless,in initial tests aimed at harvesting conferencebased tweets,the plan primarily based on the Search API was discovered to become a lot more robust. In certain,for conferences where Twitter activity was low,the Streaming API harvested fewer tweets (due mostly to timeout problems) than the Search API. Alternatively,just about every tweet identified by the Streaming API was also identified by the Search API. For that reason,the decision was created to harvest conference tweets employing the Search API. Some conference delegates may well PF-04979064 decide on to tweet in the event without having utilizing a hashtag or keyword,and such contenteven if it were straight relevant for the conferencewould be invisible to the harvesting system. By the same token,on the other hand,the same content will be hard to determine for other users. It can be most likely,therefore,that the amount of such untagged tweets are going to be small when compared with the number labelled having a conference hashtag. It need to also be noted that there is certainly degeneracy amongst hashtag usage: different conferences legitimately employ the same hashtag. In an effort to minimise the likelihood of harvesting inappropriate tweets,the search on a particular hashtag or keyword was restricted to the dates on which the relevant conference was held. By way of example,the hashtag #isb was made use of by a conference organised by the International Society of Biomechanics but also for 1 organised by the International Society of Bassists (and fairly possibly by various other societies); limiting the search for the dates on which conferences have been 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 have been also occasions on which the usage of a hashtag was contested throughout an occasion. For example,#pathways would happen to be a reputable hashtag for probably the most Twitteractive conferences within this sample,“Pathways Towards Habitable PlanetsII”. Certainly,this distinct hashtag was.