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I set up a Twitter archive for #CHSCsummit using Martin Hawksey’s free Twitter Archiving Google Sheets (aka TAGS). This archive contains tweets using the hashtag from November 11, 2016 onward, and should pull in the latest tweets every hour from now on. (We’re at 437 tweets as of 6:07am this morning.)

You can see the spreadsheet here: the “summary” sheet has analytic data like who’s been tweeting the most using the hashtag, the “dashboard” sheet has charts and graphs of tweeting activity, and the “archive” sheet is the straight spreadsheet of collected tweet data.

You can also see a dynamic visualization of people using the hashtag to hold conversations.

And here is a searchable, prettier interface for exploring the tweets.

Ethics

We had some excellent conversations yesterday about how new interfaces to existing data (like this archive and visualizations) may involve possibilities that people didn’t predict or consent to. Please do let me know if you have any reservations at all about our collecting and displaying tweet data this way (amandavisconti@gmail.com or @Literature_Geek).

And if you’re interested in conversations around the ethics of social media archiving, interfacing, and research, at least two members of the amazing Documenting the Now project (Community Lead Bergis Jules, and Advisory Board Member Meredith Evans) are here, and the project nurtures a fantastic ongoing, open-to-the-public conversation around these issues on a Slack you can join (Slack is a set of thematically related chat rooms).

Set something similar up for another hashtag

These are very simple to set up to track any Twitter hashtag or other search—basically typing in your search term, and okaying some Google and Twitter permissions. (Note that because of Twitter limitations a new archive will only pull tweets a week back, but will catch all tweets going forward—so it’s good to create an archive as soon as you know you’ll want one). I’m happy to help if you run into any issues.