[Air-L] Twitter Revisited

[Shulman, Stu]

Researchers rightly have a lot of questions about Twitter data access. Some
of our updated answers are posted on Twitter. We encourage you to read and
engage with this specific thread if this topic matters to you:

https://twitter.com/discovertext/status/1643946603886026752?s=20

The most important thing to know is there are already millions of extant
datasets stored in a raw JSON format on other computers, devices, and
systems that could be loaded to DiscoverText or other systems for
collaborative access and research.

Going forward, the opportunities to collect unique, tailored, specific real
time or historical data will be very sharply curtailed by Twitter. As time
passes, archival questions of what remains and what is lost to history may
track closely to the history of newspapers. I wrote a dissertation (1999)
about crumbly newspapers from the Progressive Era. Some were available,
others were not. This applies to Twitter data now and it always did. Some
was preserved, much is lost or will be lost, even with serious archival
efforts.

I invite you to book a web meeting or send me a note if you have questions
about what remains possible. I have curated thousands of Twitter datasets
consisting of more than 300,000,000 Tweets. Others have much larger
collections. There are important questions about what comes next in the
history of information and how we work together to preserve research
opportunities.

Finally, there will be a small gaggle over drinks in Washington DC close to
the Capitol after dinner April 13. Send me a note if you are local and want
to join the conversation face to face about the politics of Twitter data.
In years past, these discussions in DC have been lively.

Stu

-- 
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Founder and CEO, Texifter
Editor Emeritus, *Journal of Information Technology & Politics*