"The BBC's Great Debate": Anonymised Data from a #BBCDebate Archive

"The BBC's Great Debate" was broadcasted live in the UK by the BBC on Tuesday 21 June 2016 between 20:00 and 22:00 BST. It saw activity on Twitter with the #BBCDebate hashtag. I collected some of the Tweets tagged with #BBCDebate using a Google Spreadsheet.

The raw data was downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet file containing an archive of 38,166 Tweets  (38,066 Unique Tweets) publicly published with the queried hashtag (#BBCDebate) between 14/06/2016 22:03:18 and 22/06/2016 09:12:32 BST. Due to the expected high volume of Tweets only users with at least 10 followers were included in the archive. 

The Tweets contained in the Archive sheet were collected using Martin Hawksey’s TAGS 6.0.

Given the relatively large volume of activity expected around #BBCDebate and the public and political nature of the hashtag, I have only shared indicative data. No full tweets nor any other associated metadata have been shared.

The dataset contains a metrics summary as well as a table with column headings labeled  created_at,  time,    geo_coordinates (anonymised; if there was data YES has been indicated; if no data was present the corresponding cell has been left blank), user_lang and user_followers_count data corresponding to each Tweet.

Timestamps should suffice to prove the existence of the Tweets and could be useful to run analyses of activity on Twitter around a real-time media event.

No Personally identifiable information (PII), nor Sensitive Personal Information (SPI) was collected nor was contained in the dataset.

Some basic deduplication and refining of the collected data performed.

I have shared the anonymised dataset including the extra tables as a sample and as an act of citizen scholarship in order to archive, document and encourage open educational and historical research and analysis. It is hoped that by sharing the data someone else might be able to run different analyses and ideally discover different or more significant insights.

For more information including methodological and limitation issues etc. please click on the references listed below.