[Air-L] Twitter Collection and Analysis Toolkit seeks caring new owner

[Jacob Groshek]

Dear Colleagues and Friends,

I hope this message finds everyone doing well and managing through this
difficult time.

I am posting to this list because, after about 7+ years, I am
decommissioning a Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Collection and
Analysis Toolkit (DMI-TCAT) installation that I oversee.  More details on
this system, developed by Erik Borra and Bernhard Rieder, are available on
github here https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/dmi-tcat

While this is an open source platform that was generously made freely
available by the developers (sincere and deep thanks to Erik and Bernhard),
there can be costs involved with hosting and storage of the system and
data.  So while there are a variety of reasons for my decision, including a
finite amount of research funds that I can dedicate each year, I am truly
saddened to be pulling the plug especially because I am fully aware of the
value this system carries and its important as a resource for academic
research.

To cut to the chase, it is roughly $370 per month to host and store this
TCAT on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and right now, this TCAT install is at
about 70% elastic capacity with more than *560 million tweets* collected
over the last few years, on a wide variety of topics, many that relate to
political and health communication.

If anyone is interested to take over this system, or if there are questions
out there, please reach out to me off list and I'm happy to discuss.  If
there are no takers, this data will no longer be maintained by me after
June 30, and repositories of literally hundreds of millions of tweets on
COVID-19 and other topics will be lost to the ether.

Sorry for the long-ish message and thanks for your consideration.

Best regards,

Jacob
--
Dr. Jacob Groshek
Ross Beach Chair in Emerging Media Research and Associate Professor
Kansas State University
jacobgroshek.com | @jacobgroshek <https://twitter.com/jacobgroshek> | google
scholar <https://scholar.google.nl/citations?user=G1XXhccAAAAJ&hl=en>

Honorary Associate Professor, Roskilde University
<https://ruc.dk/en/department-communication-and-arts>
Associate Director, CMCS @ <https://sites.bu.edu/cmcs/> Boston U
<https://sites.bu.edu/cmcs/> | Founding Editor, *JoCTEC
<http://www.joctec.org/>*
Previously: Erasmus U
<https://www.eur.nl/en/eshcc/research/ermecc/people/research-fellows> |
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