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

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 assessed the toolkit’s effectiveness in guiding practitioners to search, collect, and be critical when analyzing data from Twitter. We evaluated the toolkit with ten practitioners from three non-profit organizations of different aims and sizes in Mexico. The assessment surfaced tensions between the assumptions embedded in the toolkit’s design and practitioners’ expectations, needs, and backgrounds. We show that 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 recommendations for researchers who developed tools for non-profit organizations to inform humanitarian action.