Engaging community members with digitally curated social media content at an arts festival

Capturing, uploading, and presenting social media content online have become the standard way for people to share their experiences with friends, family members, and others. In this paper, we describe our effort to extract, aggregate, and visualize, in a smartphone app, real-time and historical hyperlocal social media discussions and photos created at a regional arts festival that attracted over 100,000 visitors over a period of 5 days. Participants reported that the resulting content enriched their festival experience, and that it helped to create a social scaffold encouraging them to further engage and interact with others both physically and virtually through sharing even more user-contributed content.