Not necessarily entirely precise. One example is,it can be possible that some individuals identified themselves unable to attend a conference but nevertheless seem on a list of delegates; other folks may well have registered late and don’t seem on such a list; but other individuals could have requested not to have their names appear on a public list. Furthermore,not all participants attend all offered sessions of a conference. Nonetheless,though there’s an inevitable uncertainty within the metric,the product of conference participants and conference duration does appear to supply a affordable measure in the size of an event. Thankfully,as is going to be noticed in “Results” section,an uncertainty in participant number as significant as (which could possibly be viewed as being unduly pessimistic) turns out to not have an effect on the conclusions. The conferences in this sample ranged in size from participants at one particular intense to participants at the other. An evaluation showed no connection among the amount of participants and also the degree of twitter activity.Conference hashtagsTwo applications were written to harvest tweets that contained a conference hashtag or related keyword: one particular program applied 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 possibly improved suited for singular searches. Twitter itself states that the Search API is just not a full index of all tweets,and study by GonzalezBailon et al. shows that the Search API “overrepresents the additional central customers and does not give an accurate picture of peripheral activity”. Nevertheless,in initial tests aimed at harvesting conferencebased tweets,the program primarily based around the Search API was found to be much more robust. In distinct,for conferences where Twitter activity was low,the Streaming API harvested fewer tweets (due mostly to timeout problems) than the Search API. Alternatively,every tweet identified by the Streaming API was also identified by the Search API. As a result,the choice was made to harvest conference tweets applying the Search API. Some conference delegates could possibly pick out to tweet in the occasion with no making use of a hashtag or keyword,and such contenteven if it had been directly relevant for the conferencewould be invisible towards the harvesting system. By the exact same token,having said that,precisely the same content will be hard to identify for other customers. It can be likely,hence,that the amount of such untagged tweets will be little when compared with the quantity labelled having a conference hashtag. It must 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 towards the dates on which the relevant conference was held. By way of example,the hashtag #isb was used by a conference organised by the International Society of Biomechanics but in addition for one particular organised by the International Society of Bassists (and rather possibly by several other societies); limiting the search to the dates on which conferences had been held was a way of Methyl linolenate site 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 had been also occasions on which the use of a hashtag was contested in the course of an occasion. By way of example,#pathways would have already been a reputable hashtag for probably the most Twitteractive conferences within this sample,“Pathways Towards Habitable PlanetsII”. Certainly,this distinct hashtag was.