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Twitter as a first draft of the present: and the challenges of preserving it for the future

Published: 22 May 2016 Publication History

Abstract

This paper provides a framework for understanding Twitter as a historical source. We address digital humanities scholars to enable the transfer of concepts from traditional source criticism to new media formats, and to encourage the preservation of Twitter as a cultural artifact. Twitter has established itself as a key social media platform which plays an important role in public, real-time conversation. Twitter is also unique as its content is being archived by a public institution (the Library of Congress). In this paper we will show that we still have to assume that much of the contextual information beyond the pure tweet texts is already lost, and propose additional objectives for preservation.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WebSci '16: Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Web Science
    May 2016
    392 pages
    ISBN:9781450342087
    DOI:10.1145/2908131
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    Published: 22 May 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. Twitter
    2. archiving
    3. cultural heritage
    4. historical sources
    5. history
    6. social media
    7. user-generated content

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    May 22 - 25, 2016
    Hannover, Germany

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