[Air-L] Downloading Twitter feeds

[Shulman, Stu]

The answer is complex, uncertain, and shifting. It is more than just a
technical issue of "Where can I get data now?" There are fundamental legal,
jurisdictional, market, equity, and political questions unresolved.
Resolution seems unlikely in the short term. As a political scientist
interested in election interference, I do not anticipate a positive
resolution before the 2024 U.S. election. I would love to be wrong on that
prediction. I have heard there are a few firms that retain agreements to
market real time and historical Twitter data. You might ask your librarian
about access to Crimson Hexagon, Meltwater, or other similar services with
long term agreements Mr. Musk has not broken, yet. Nobody on the AIR-L list
has confirmed whether the academic API is shut down. Is it? I don't have
those credentials to check.

As I have written previously, there are massive troves of Tweets in every
computer science department and many social science departments. Any one of
the raw JSON Tweet archives could be loaded into a free account on
DiscoverText and then shared for teaching or research. Talk to the data
folks on your campus and across your discipline about what is extant. Do
not look for spreadsheets; find the raw JSON. Spreadsheets are
significantly degraded historical objects that cannot be considered
accurate representations of Tweets. Tweets live in the Twitter display and
die in spreadsheets. I remain befuddled by the Python/R nexus. Those
spreadsheets of Tweets simply are not Twitter. Any qualitative
researcher knows what I mean. Meaning is produced in the interaction of the
display elements. Meaning is destroyed, diluted, and bent out of shape in
spreadsheets.

The loss of real time access to new data is a problem and dangerous for
democratic systems. This does not change the fact that so much data has
been gathered and stored, like so many old newspapers. For example, here is
a list of the Top 50 datasets in my DiscoverText account that any academic
on this list or anywhere in the world can access via the "peer network"
that enables collaboration, annotation, measurement of inter-rater
reliability, and the creation of gold standard training sets for
machine-learning via a graphical user interface that features the Twitter
display.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1j-Y40WmwFIX8pidfAcxgAt5JB3A3UyB2psh_ULQdynA/edit?usp=sharing


"The Case Against Spreadsheets as a Primary Twitter Research Tool"
https://vimeo.com/526218014
Question: When is a Tweet not a Tweet? Answer: When it appears in a
spreadsheet, or is deleted, or the account has been suspended.

On Tue, Apr 18, 2023 at 5:56 AM M.E.Sciubba via Air-L <
air-l at listserv.aoir.org> wrote:

> Hi Rotem and All,
>
> I am also looking for solutions to this. I hope somebody has an idea of how
> to keep doing research on Twitter.
>
> Eleonora
> *--*
>
> Dr. Maria Eleonora Sciubba
> (she/her)
> (2022): “Adesso m’incazzo!”: Swearwords as resources for managing negative
> emotions in interaction <https://mediazioni.unibo.it/article/view/15263>
> (2021) https://rolsi.net/2021/06/02/guest-blog-em-ca-for-racial-justice/
>
> *TSHD - Grant Design & Writing *
> *Department of Culture Studies - Senior Researcher*
> Editor, Internship Organizational Supervisor *Diggit Magazine*
> <https://www.diggitmagazine.com/>
> Tilburg University
> Twitter: @LolaSciubba
>
>
>
>
>
> *Be green. Keep it on the screen.*
>
>
> Il giorno mar 18 apr 2023 alle ore 11:15 Rotem Perach via Air-L <
> air-l at listserv.aoir.org> ha scritto:
>
> > Hi All,
> >
> > Can anyone recommend a way to download the feeds (historical tweets and
> > re-tweets) of Twitter users? Is scraping for example using Data Miner a
> > good idea?
> > With the changes to Twitter's API rules, API-based websites such as
> > Vicinitas.io have stopped working (or will stop soon), and I'm looking
> for
> > other approaches.
> >
> > Thank you for your help.
> >
> > Kind regards,
> >
> >
> > Rotem
> >
> > -----------
> >
> > Dr Rotem Perach (he/him)
> > Senior Research Fellow
> > School of Social Sciences
> > University of Westminster
> >
> > ORCID<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8647-4367> | Twitter<
> > https://twitter.com/DrRotemPerach/>
> >
> >
> > The University of Westminster is a charity and a company limited by
> > guarantee. Registration number: 977818 England. Registered Office: 309
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-- 
Dr. Stuart W. Shulman
Founder and CEO, Texifter
Editor Emeritus, *Journal of Information Technology & Politics*