Project Twitter Literature: Scraping, Analyzing, and Archiving Twitter Data in Literary Research
Creators: name: Howard-Sukhil, Christian
Publisher: name: unknown
Year: 2020
Subjects: subject: Social media
subject: Data curation
subject: Digital preservation

description: Project Twitter Literature (TwitLit), seeks to address a growing gap in the literary-historical record[1] by establishing a consistent, rigorous, and ethical method for scraping and cleaning up Twitter data for the use of humanities scholars. In particular, my project explores the growing community of amateur writers who are using Twitter as a means of publication and dissemination for their literary output. There are three parts to my project: the research findings related to the global literary community on Twitter, the tools and resources developed as part of the project and made openly available to other scholars, and partnership with a university library to ensure the long-term preservation of the collected data.

Information relating to the data collection process and research findings – including detailed instructions, the Python scripts used to collect Twitter data, and a list of resources – are free and openly accessible on the project's website (www.twit-lit.com) and GitHub repository (https://github.com/TwitLit/TwitLitSource). Other scholars are invited to use these scripts and other resources to collect their own Twitter data.

[1] In December 2017, the Library of Congress, which began archiving Twitter in 2010, announced that it would no longer collect all Tweets; instead, Tweets produced after December 2017 would only be collected on a selective basis. There are no other ongoing, systematic efforts to collect and preserve this digital material. See Library of Congress, "Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress" (December 2017).
description: Project Twitter Literature (TwitLit), seeks to address a growing gap in the literary-historical record[1] by establishing a consistent, rigorous, and ethical method for scraping and cleaning up Twitter data for the use of humanities scholars. In particular, my project explores the growing community of amateur writers who are using Twitter as a means of publication and dissemination for their literary output. There are three parts to my project: the research findings related to the global literary community on Twitter, the tools and resources developed as part of the project and made openly available to other scholars, and partnership with a university library to ensure the long-term preservation of the collected data. Information relating to the data collection process and research findings – including detailed instructions, the Python scripts used to collect Twitter data, and a list of resources – are free and openly accessible on the project's website (www.twit-lit.com) and GitHub repository (https://github.com/TwitLit/TwitLitSource). Other scholars are invited to use these scripts and other resources to collect their own Twitter data. [1] In December 2017, the Library of Congress, which began archiving Twitter in 2010, announced that it would no longer collect all Tweets; instead, Tweets produced after December 2017 would only be collected on a selective basis. There are no other ongoing, systematic efforts to collect and preserve this digital material. See Library of Congress, "Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress" (December 2017).