Late last year I was delighted to be invited to be one of four keynote speakers at a workshop on religion and social media at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media in Oxford in May. Here are some initial thoughts on what I intend to say.

There has been an interesting upswing recently in scholarly interest in the ways in which religious people, and the organisations in which they gather together, represent themselves and communicate with others on social media. However, this work has been conducted relatively independently from the emerging body of scholarship on the archived web.

There are some reasons for this. First is the fact that much of the scholarship on social media tends to be focussed very firmly on the present. As such, data tends to be gathered directly from social media platforms “to order”, to match the particular research questions in view, and does not engage the various web archives that are in existence, whether at national libraries or the Internet Archive.

The second reason (which may indeed be the more important) is that traditional web archiving has limited success in archiving social media content. There are several well-documented reasons for this, not least the significant technical difficulties in capturing the content as it is presented in user interfaces such as that for Twitter or YouTube. Also, the data gathered is wrapped up in its presentation layer, rather than being neatly organised as a dataset for analysis. Aside from these technical challenges, the very social nature of social media – with multiple content creators co-existing and interacting on the same platform – adds considerable complexity to the task of the web archivist of determining which content can be archived under existing legal deposit frameworks.

So much for the reasons; but this gap between social media research and the archived web needs to be closed, because part of the story is missed. If we want to understand the evolution of the engagement of churches with social media, then we need to understand the ways in which traditional church websites integrated social media content within themselves, and from what point in time. As well as this, we need to be able to understand the content to which social media users were referring and linking – content which will increasingly often be found only in web archives as it disappears from the live web.

In Oxford, I shall be presenting some small case studies in the development of the web and social media presence of local churches, individuals and national church bodies in England and in Ireland. How quickly did churches begin to integrate their social media channels with their websites – which is to ask, at which point did social media become central to their communication strategies ? This is enabled by data made available from the British Library which covers the period from 1996 until 2013; the period in which social media grew from nothing to the prominence it now holds.

[Updated, 5 June 2015: here are the slides:
[http://www.slideshare.net/pj_webster/slideshelf]