208 Leith Street

In the 1960s a flat called Che Choux at 64 Heriot Row (Cabbage House, named for the Cabbage Tree in the front garden) also had letterhead which was printed at the Christs College Press. Unfortunately there are no copies of the letterhead available in their archives.

In the early 1970s a flat called The Spanish Slum, 16-18 London Street, also had letterhead, though it is unknown where this was printed.

It is interesting to see the shift in personalisation of communication forms from a hard copy print environment, to the digital; from email, to social media where platforms like Facebook suddenly make it very easy to communicate with many people simultaneously. Where once flats went to the extent to have letterhead designed and printed, todays students can easily set up a Facebook page for their flat. There are several examples, of this practice, such as The Chateau at 47 London Street, The V Flat at 97 Dundas Street and the 8 Man at 627 Castle Street.

Did you have letterhead or a Facebook page for your student flat, or do you know of a flat that had letterhead or has a Facebook page? If so, Id love to hear about it.

Also, I think it’ll be interesting to explore this some more.

It just so happened that Facebook fulfilled a need I had at the time (Nov 2007) to share a bunch of photos and see if I could make some connections with the Scarfies who’d lived in those flats. It’s working. To date there are 1233 members who are tagging photos and making comments. So, Facebook is largely fulfilling that initial need of mine beautifully.

I’m finding however that there are things I’d like to do, or would be interested to discover, that Facebook currently doesn’t seem to allow, and that is due more to my needs as a researcher rather than a failing on Facebook’s part. It is, after all, inherently, a social networking forum, a place to meet and chat and share, not so much a place to easily gather, organise and distribute data.

It would be handy though.

For instance, I’d like to be able to download all wall posts to excel, I’d like to be able to download all the comments and tags against each photo in my collection. I’d like to be able to track the rate of membership against date in order to ascertain what, if any, external or internal factors may have influenced sudden leaps in numbers, for example, the freedom of the post exam period at the end of term or articles published in the media or a group of friends all joining at the same time.

Groups, it seems are being replaced by fan pages here’s an issue. It may have a few extra features but I have a heap of data in my group and I’m not going to try and manage two sites. That’ll be a headache.

Here are some other sources I’ve found which touch on using FB for social research. Like I said, I’ve not yet thoroughly scoured for sources, I will. I’m interested to hear from anyone in the know on the subject.

Facebook research / orgtheroy.net
Poke 1.0 – a Facebook social research symposium
Supporting collaboration in the Era of Internet-scale Data / Cameron Marlow

When my two colleagues and I were working on our assignment for the print culture exhibition pitch back in 2000/2001, there was a lot of discussion about how to present this as an exhibiton to the public. I was keen to have a web based database for both promotional and information gathering purposes as a component of the exhibition.

I recently came across an email I’d written to my colleagues about this. We’d decided against the web based element because the general public had limited access at the time.

“The web thing immediately sprang to mind, I guess because it’s a fun media to work with, but for the public it’s not that accessible and they’re really our audience.” Email 15 February 2001, 8.46am.

Technology has moved on fast! I set up the groups on Flickr and  Facebook in November 2007.