Twitter’s increasingly influential role in journalism has prompted an accompanying upsurge in academic research, particularly around the ways in which journalists and media organizations have integrated Twitter into their norms and practices.
With 500 million tweets a day, Twitter offers researchers a potentially deep and rich stream of social media data. However, unlike historical newspaper content, which is readily available via library microfiches or databases like Lexis Nexis, much of the historical data on Twitter (what’s called the Twitter firehose) is walled off in costly private archives.
Information may want to be free, but accessing and analyzing that information can be costly.
The Library of Congress signed a deal with Twitter in 2010 to build an on-site research archive but that system has still not been finalized. A progress update is expected this summer, but the archive, which now houses more than 170 billion tweets, poses major logistical challenges for the Library and the firehose reseller Gnip, which is delivering the data for Twitter. Read more
