This is the final release of SFM under our grant from the National Historical Publications & Records Commission (NHPRC). While we don’t currently have plans for additional major development, we intend to fix bugs and make minor tweaks. Feel free to add tickets to Github reporting bugs or suggesting future enhancements, thumbs up or add comments to an existing ticket, or, better yet, submit a pull request. And we’re always happy to answer questions or generally talk about collecting social media data. We’re continuing to run SFM at Gelman Library and support researchers here at George Washington University.
To finish strong, we included a few significant enhancements in this final release. The first enhancement is support for HTTPS. Just provide your own certificate and fiddle some configuration and you’re good to go.
While you will find some usability improvements throughout the application, the biggest change is on the collection detail page. If, like us, you often build collections with thousands of seeds (e.g., our news outlet collection has 4123 accounts), the change will be immediately obvious – the page renders almost immediately instead of the previous 30ish seconds. This was accomplished by using AJAX to deliver the seed list and optimizing the calculation of the change log.
And lastly, as software development draws to a close, we’d like to express our gratitude for and acknowledge the contributions of the student team members that worked on the software or documentation: Aditya Dharne, Yecheng Tan, Rajat Vij, Soomin Park, and Yonah Bromberg Gaber. SFM is far better because of their dedication and skill.