DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15627799
title: Links to Trove shared on Twitter, 2009 to 2020

description: This dataset contains information about links to resources in Trove that were shared on Twitter between 2009 and 2020.

The tweet data was compiled using Twarc in May 2021, under Twitter's academic access program. The search queries used were:



url:nla.gov.au/nla.news

url:trove.nla.gov.au

url:newspapers.nla.gov.au


From the raw tweet data I extracted the Trove urls from either the entities -> urls field, or by running a regular expression over the tweet text. Where necessary, I attempted to unshorten any shortened links.

Many of the tweets were produced by bots. Using my Trove bots Twitter list, I separated the tweets into two files, one for bots and one for ordinary users.

To respect user intentions and comply with the Twitter API terms of use, I've removed all the tweet information except for tweet_id and tweet_date from the files. If it hasn't been deleted, the full data for each tweet can be obtained from the X API using the tweet_id, though this would probably require a paid subscription.

Links in tweets data

The main data files are:



trove_url_tweets.csv – links shared by human users (although it may include some unidentified bots)

trove_url_tweets_bots.csv – links shared by bots


Both files contain the following fields:



tweet_id

tweet_date

trove_url – the shared url

trove_type – type of Trove resource, possible values include:



article – an individual newspaper article

page – a page of a newspaper

title – a newspaper title

work – an individual Trove resource from outside the newspapers category

other – anything else, including search queries and links to the home page



trove_id – the identifier of the Trove resource (extracted from the url)


In addition, the trove_url_tweets.csv file contains the following field:



nla_official – this is set to True or False and indicates whether the tweet originated from one of the NLA's official Twitter accounts.


Some tweets contain multiple links. The datasets include one row for each link. This means that a single tweet_id can appear multiple times.

Other data files

In addition, I created a few derivative data files:



trove_url_totals.csv

active_users_per_year.csv

active_bots_per_year.csv


trove_url_totals.csv

This file contains information about the number of times each link was shared by users (not including bots). The file includes the following fields:



trove_id – Trove identifier, using this and trove_type you can query the Trove API for further information

trove_type – type of Trove resource, possible values include:



article – an individual newspaper article

page – a page of a newspaper

title – a newspaper title

work – an individual Trove resource from outside the newspapers category

other – anything else, including search queries and links to the home page



tweets – number of tweets containing a link to this resource

retweets – number of retweets containing a link to this resource

quotes – number of quote tweets containing a link to this resource

total – the total number of times this link was shared (sum of tweets, retweets, quotes)


active_users_per_year.csv

This file contains information about the number of unique users each year who shared a link to Trove. The file includes the following fields:



year

users – number of unique users who shared a Trove link in this year


active_bots_per_year.csv

This file contains information about the number of active bots each year that shared links to Trove. The file includes the following fields:



year

bots – number of bots that shared a Trove link in this year


Some summary information




Number of unique users sharing Trove links
9,296


Number of bots sharing Trove links
43


Number of tweets by humans containing Trove links
48,323


Number of tweets by bots containing Trove links
318,767


Number of unique links shared by humans
36,906


Number of unique links shared by bots
270,474




 

See this blog post for more information.

Versions

v1 – initial release

v2 – moved some tweets from bots to humans as some accounts were not originally bots