How can digital humanities projects use social networking to expand their audience base and excite new audiences about content?  Hi, my name is Amanda Sikarskie, and I work in project development on the Quilt Index, www.quiltindex.org.  The QI is an online resource for scholars and educators, providing access to images and metadata for around 50,000 (and counting) historic and contemporary quilts held in collections across the U.S.

One common goal of many digital humanities projects (and we’re no exception) is reaching new audiences—especially younger audiences, audiences outside academia and K-12, and audiences outside the U.S—and exciting those audiences about the objects in our database.  I’ve used Facebook and Twitter to help the QI achieve these goals, and in this session, I’d like to talk about some of the specific strategies I’ve used with these sites (an object of the day, polls, galleries, etc) and also brainstorm other ways that digital humanities projects can make the best use of social networking apps.

I’d also like to talk about how I’ve used analytics such as Facebook Insights, WeFollow and Klout, and how any digital humanities project can use social networking analytics apps to see how they’re meeting their audience goals.  We learned that through social networking we’re reaching audiences in places from Ethiopia to Bangladesh, and that we have a huge following in Italy!

Come to this session if you have anything to share or learn about social networking and digital humanities projects!