How Academics Can Use Snapchat to Share Their Research

When Snapchat began, in 2011, the appeal of the video-messaging app was a mystery to Jill W. Rettberg, and many others over the age of 30. None of her friends were on it, she says, so the 44-year-old professor of digital culture at the University of Bergen, in Norway figured she was too old and deleted the app soon after trying it.

Since then, however, its popularity has soared, particularly among millennials the age of her students. So she wondered: How could Snapchat be useful for academic purposes?

On a family vacation several months ago, her teenage daughter showed her how to use the app’s selfie filters to swap faces or make it look as if the subject were spitting out rainbows. For most users, it’s a feature that allows them to send silly pictures to friends. But for Ms. Rettberg, who has studied facial-recognition surveillance, it was a research topic. She wondered when people trust a technology platform enough to share, and morph, their own images. So she jotted down a story board and made video about it on Snapchat. That was her first research Snapchat story.

The two-minute video is made up a series of 10-second clips in which Ms. Rettberg explains the biometrics behind the feature. “Snapchat needs to convert our faces into data so it can run the algorithm that lets it do the filters,” she says in the video. “Our faces become data that can be manipulated.”

Her face morphs from dog to panda while she explains that while biometrics are also used to identify criminals, Snapchat has created a “very nonscary” way of using the same techniques.

The video got about 200 views on Snapchat and about 100 more when she uploaded it to YouTube. So she decided to make another, and then another.

For the past several weeks, Ms. Rettberg has posted a research story on Snapchat nearly every day. All of her videos are related to her research interests, such as wearable technology and digital storytelling.

In one video, she shows footage of herself pulling books off shelves in a library and highlighting passages related to technology and identity. In another she shares photos from a conference on open-access publishing with clever annotations appearing as speech bubbles.

Other videos are in less-academic settings. In one she is shown running in a park as she talks about the ways in which individuals trust smartphone applications, like Spotify and health-tracking apps, to store data. At the end of the video, she asks viewers to snap her back with feedback that she can include in a forthcoming paper. She did get a few responses.

“Part of your job as a university professor, you’re supposed to create knowledge, do research,” she says. “You’re supposed to teach, but you’re also supposed to share knowledge to the general public.” These days a lot of the general public is on Snapchat, she says.

Billions of Views

Snapchat delivers nearly seven billion video views a day, trailing only Facebook’s eight billion. This is a platform on which individuals are interested in content, says Ms. Rettberg, and academics should take advantage of that.

But how can academics use a platform that deletes their work after 24 hours? Ms. Rettberg hasn’t figured that one out yet. For now she saves all of her stories and later uploads them to YouTube. She’s noticed that that’s not a common practice among avid, digital-native Snapchatters.

Why doesn’t she blog about her research? Why not create something on YouTube or Instagram? For one thing, Ms. Rettberg says, the way Snapchat works, she doesn’t have to worry about the quality of the videos, because she cannot edit them. Using Snapchat feels like the early days of blogging, she says, a time when authenticity was more important than editing or polish. The first week she made the videos, she storyboarded a few ideas of subjects she knew she would end up writing papers about. “It’s allowed to be imperfect because everyone knows there are constraints,” she says. “It’s going to disappear.”

And Snapchat stories don’t have to be as expansive as blog posts. The platform, she says, has the same immediacy as Facebook or Twitter, giving her just enough time to spark someone’s curiosity.

“Whenever you are trying to share any research idea with the public, you’ve got to simplify it or find that nugget that is interesting,” she says.

As opposed to video-blogging on YouTube, she adds, using Snapchat has the “feeling of being taken into someone’s life.” Or into campus life.

Snapchat isn’t new to higher education. Institutions including the University of Michigan and the University of Houston, have held accounts for years to engage prospective and current students. Those efforts let others see what it’s like to be a student on campus.

Some professors have also tried to use the app in the classroom. But few professors have attempted to use the platform to gather or disseminate their own research.

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