Historical Record of Tweets
Posted by: Rebecca Vnuk
If you think of tweets as part of our throw-away culture, like styrofoam coffee cups, think again. The New York Times reports today that the Library of Congress will archive Twitter. Not just selected parts of it. All of it. The Twitter archive will become part of the library’s “Web capture” project that already holds 167 terabytes of digital material, much more than the equivalent of the text of the library’s books. According to communications director Matt Raymond, the archive will be available “only for scholarly and research purposes.” Click here to read Raymond’s post on the Library of Congress blog, and here to read the post on the Twitter blog.
When I was in graduate school studying English I used the collected letters of writers like Jane Austen to gain insight into their work. Of course, nobody writes letters anymore. But maybe one day we’ll see scholarly editions of “Collected Tweets” instead.
April 22nd, 2010 at 8:07 am
[...] Last week I wrote about the Library of Congress plan to archive Twitter. Gary Price of ResourceShelf dug deep into this story. Since Google already has a searchable Twitter archive, he made a special point of sorting out the differences between the two plans, the chief one being that while the LC archive will only be available to researchers on site, the Google archive (called Google Replay) is for the public. You can read Gary’s post here. [...]