A few hours ago the following tweet by @librarycongress appeared in my timeline “Library acquires ENTIRE Twitter archive. ALL tweets. More info here http://go.usa.gov/ik4”
All your tweets are belong to us
This is big. The ENTIRE archive containing ALL tweets? But if we read the official announcement on the Library of Congress blog it states “all public tweets” which seems like it will not include protected accounts and direct messages. The LoC blog went down due to the amount of attention so they decided to post the announcement on Facebook (as it contained more than 140 characters ;)) where a discussion immediately started off. Users are either surprised by this acquisition because they don’t see the value in it, or they are upset because they have acquired their personal tweets. However, as Manuel Magaña notes on Facebook, everytime you press “tweet” you agree to Twitter’s Terms of Service. Even if Twitter feels like a common good, it is still a company that can sell your personal user generated content. However, the Library of Congress is a “federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress” (About) and as such serves the members of Congress which may raise critical inquiries of using Twitter’s archive for political purposes and investigations.
Twitter as a historical tool
So how could the LoC tweet archive be used by researchers? In response to the value of the Twitter archive Randy Rice on Facebook describes how Twitter may serve as a people’s history for historians. With the Digital Methods Initiative we have previously used Twitter to write about the Iran (Green) Revolution by using tweets containing the #iranelection hashtag. Twitter is currently very limited in its use for historical accounts as documented by people present at events. Twitter’s search archive only goes back two weeks and only a custom built scraper may be able to retrieve older tweets. This is not within the skills of the sociologist or historian but an accessible archive may open up a new, huge, sourceset. How does one make sense of an enormous database filled with tweets? One way is to scrape hashtags for a certain event. Two questions remain: 1. will the entire archive become public? 2. will it contain a search function?
A mosaic of humanity
Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar’s “I Want You To Want Me” is an installation that documents our search for love on online dating sites. By scraping all the public data from dating sites it is “a very fertile ground for building a mosaic of humanity” according to Harris. When we enter our thoughts and feelings into databases we can use these for datamining to say something about our culture. And that is exactly what the Library of Congress seems to want. It acknowledges that not only books are part of our cultural heritage but also the updates on Twitter:
We also operate the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program www.digitalpreservation.gov, which is pursuing a national strategy to collect, preserve and make available significant digital content, especially information that is created in digital form only, for current and future generations. (Raymond 2010)
During the CPoV Wikipedia conference there was a lot of activity on Twitter on the backchannel #cpov. Fanatic tweeter and co-organizer Nishant Shah even got temporarily barred from Twitter due to “excessive tweeting.” API calls are the new scarcity online! Reaching the API limit often marks you as a spammer.
On top of that Twitter search is amnesic and the #cpov conference tweets will not be available anymore in two weeks. Fortunately Daniel Mietchen made a small movie from his favorite #cpov conference tweets. It’s wonderful to see how a Twitter backchannel could provide information for those not being able to attend the conference.
A few weeks ago I noticed during the BrightNight event that my tweets did not appear in the backchannel. After extensively searching the Twitter Support pages on ‘Tweets Not In Search/Hashtags not working‘ I found out that for some reason Twitter had blocked/removed my tweets from search.
After some shout outs on Twitter, it appeared I wasn’t the only one. The initial Support pages said that the issue would resolve itself over time but after a few weeks I was getting impatient. Hashtags have become an important feature of Twitter and I felt left out during conferences, not being able to participate in the backchannel.
Yesterday @bertboerland sent me a link to file a request to be remove the constraints that have been put, for unknown reasons (I might have been marked as a spam account), on my account. Within a day I received word from Twitter that my tweets appear in search again.
Search is a core feature of Twitter as it is being used to retrieve hashtags related to a particular event for backchannels. Search could become even more powerful if Twitter would extend search retrieval beyond two weeks. It would make extensive analysis possible without scheduling a scraper.
Last night @FemkeHalsema, leader of GroenLinks parliamentary party, hosted a Twitter party for her followers. Five hundred people attended #twist in Pakhuis de Zwijger. The idea of the party came from Queen Beatrix’ annual speech in which she repeatedly stated that online communication forms are bad for our offline relations, that they lead to weaker social ties and promote anonymous hate activity. In his speech, columnist and blogger Bert Brussen, mocked the Queen for sending a telegraph STOP to our Olympic medal winners STOP
The theme of the evening was ‘A Free Web’ and also marked the launch of the GroenLinks campaign Wanted for downloading against criminalizing downloading. An evening in pictures:
Over a year ago, on January 17 2009, I gave up my tv. I must admit, the choice was not that hard. First my tv broke down and then I moved to a new house without an active cable connection so I did not bother to buy a new tv. So, how’s life, a year after I gave up on my tv?
The last image of my tv
Do I stare less at screens? No. Do I watch less series? No. After getting a VPN client a whole world of series opened up to me. The main difference between my life before and after tv? Twitter changed my viewing interests.
The Dutch twitterscene is very active commenting on tv programs. This brings back the old gathering function of tv: everyone watching the same program at the same time accompanied with a Twitter backchannel. It made me want to watch programs I would have never considered watching before. However, following the hashtag (#) that belongs to the program, to me, is as entertaining as actually watching the show. Snarky, witty comments filling my screen. However, not owning a tv means I cannot participate unless it is streamed live.
With the turmoil around the Comissie Davids (“This independent committee has investigated the preparation and the decision-making process regarding the political support given by the Netherlands for the invasion of Iraq in the period from the summer of 2002 to the summer of 2003.”) a series of debates was held. With Femke Halsema (the leader of the GreenLeft parliamentary party in the House of Representatives since 2002) twittering live during the debate the #irakdebat Twitter backchannel got an extra dimension. Not only did she keep us up to date during the recessions, she participated in the conversation about the debate on Twitter. Never before did I watch political debates which such interest. My Twitter timeline provided me with cynical jokes, political context and supporting links and a strong politician who brought me closer to politics by providing a sense of immediacy.
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