Bitacora: A Toolkit for Supporting NonProfits to Critically Reflect on Social Media Data Use

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the design and evaluation of the toolkit Bitacora, addressed to practitioners working in non-profit organizations interested in integrating Twitter data into their work. The toolkit responds to the call to maintain the locality of data by promoting a qualitative and contextualized approach to analyzing Twitter data. We collaborated with three non-profit organizations in Mexico to assess the toolkit's effectiveness in guiding practitioners to search, collect, and be critical when analyzing data from Twitter. The evaluation surfaced tensions between the assumptions embedded in the toolkit's design and practitioners' expectations, needs, and backgrounds. We show practitioners navigated these tensions in some cases by developing strategies and, in others, questioning the appropriateness of using Twitter data to inform their work. We conclude with a list of recommendations for researchers who developed tools for non-profit organizations to inform humanitarian action.