From the manifesto:
User generated content has experienced an explosive growth both in the diversity of available services and the volume of topics covered by the users. Content published in micro-blogging sites such as Twitter is a rich, heterogeneous, and, above all, huge sample of the daily musings of our fellow citizens across the world.
Once qualified as inane chatter, more and more researchers are turning to Twitter data to better understand our social behavior and, no doubt, that global chatter will provide a first person account of our times to future historians.
Thus, initiatives such as the one lead by the Library of the US Congress to collect the entire Twitter Archive are laudable. However, as of today, no researcher has been granted access to that archive, there is no estimation on when such access would be possible and, on top of that, access would only be granted on site.
As researchers we understand the legal compromises one must reach with private sector, and we understand that it is fair that Twitter and resellers offer access to Twitter data, including historical data, for a fee (a rather large one, by the way). However, without the data provided by each of Twitter users such a business would be impossible and, hence, we believe that such data belongs to the users individually and as a group.
Includes links on how to download and donate your tweets.
The researchers appeal to altruism, aggregating your tweets with others may advance human knowledge.
I have a much more pragmatic reason:
While I trust the Library of Congress, I don’t trust their pay masters.
Not to sound paranoid but the delay in anyone accessing the twitter data at the Library of Congress seems odd. The astronomy community has been providing access to much larger data sets long before the first tweet.
So why is it taking so long?
While we are waiting on multiple versions of that story, download your tweets and donate them to this project.
[…] BTW, if you do obtain your tweet archive, consider donating it to #Tweets4Science. […]
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