Platform management and development : State of art and Bibliography

Introduction

Even though Twitter and ClioWire have widely different goals, their technical properties are closely similar, and tweets can be considered as a specific social subset of pulses. Thus, in this bibliography, we will often consider resources that are based on twitter. We will first present what is a bot, as it is the main tool we will use on the ClioWire platform, and then explain why Twitter is such an important resource for data analysis.

Writing bots

A bot is an application program designed to perform, at a high speed rate, automated tasks over the Internet. In our case we will mostly focus on chatbots and social bots. [1] A chatbot is a particular type of bot, whose specifical task is to conduct a conversation via auditory or textual methods, and simulate the behaviour of a human conversational partner. [2] A social bot is a specific type of chatbot. It is employed in social media networks to automatically generate messages, and manage public relations either by acting as a "follower" or even as a fake account that gathers followers itself. [3]

We will focus on Twitter bots as an example. [4] A Twitterbot is a social bot designed to control a Twitter account and may autonomously perform actions such as tweeting, retweeting, liking, following, unfollowing, or direct messaging other accounts. (Twitterbots are estimated to create approximately 24% of tweets that are on Twitter.)

To be seen as a credible source of information, Twitterbots should adopt the following criteria : (according to a research from members of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in 2012) [5]

• "Periodic and regular timing" of tweets;
• Whether the tweet content contains known spam; and
• The ratio of tweets from mobile versus desktop, as compared to an average human Twitter user.

Datafication of pulses

Using Twitter as a data source : [6] [7]

Social media represent nowadays an important support of the collaborative creation and source of knowledge. More and more researchers are interested to explore the data provided by social media for academic purpose, for example content analysis or thematic analysis. Even if Twitter is not the most used social platform, its data is available, therefore it is commonly used by researchers.

An interesting function of Twitter, that we will make available on the ClioWire platform, is the hashtag norm. The hashtags make it easier gathering and sorting topics when browsing or collecting data.

An important way to collect and analyse data, is by Scraping : collecting online data from social media and other Web sites in the form of unstructured text and also known as site scraping, web harvesting and web data extraction. [8] Scraping is possible on sites which provide open API to query their data. ClioWire will provide an HTTP-based APIs to easily access to data feeds, and post content to the site web, allowing the existence of bots.