A Collection of Twitter Archives Related to Digital Humanities

A collection of datsets containing Twitter data from hashtags associated to conferences and other academic activities related to the digital humanities.

Please note there are likely to be updates; each version will have a different DOI (ending in v1; v2; etc.).


Rationale

Tweets published publicly by scholars during academic conferences are often tagged (labeled) with a hashtag dedicated to the conference in question.

The purpose and function of hashtags is to organise and describe information/outputs under the relevant label in order to enhance the discoverability of the labeled information/outputs (tweets in this case). A hashtag is metadata users choose freely to use so their content is associated, directly linked to and categorised with the chosen hashtag. Though every reason for Tweeters' use of hashtags cannot be generalised nor predicted, it can be argued that scholarly Twitter users form specialised, self-selecting networks that tend to observe, more often than not, scholarly modes of behaviour. Generally it can be argued that scholarlyTwitter users tag their public tweets with a conference hashtag as a means to report from, comment on and generally contribute publicly to the scholarly conversation around conferences.

Professional associations like the Modern Language Association recognise tweets as citeable scholarly outputs. Archiving scholarly tweets is a means to preserve this form of rapid online scholarship that otherwise can very likely become unretrievable as time passes; Twitter's search API has well-known temporal limitations for retrospective historical search and collection.

Beyond individual tweets as scholarly outputs, the collective scholarly activity on Twitter around a conference or academic project or event can provide interesting insights for the contemporary history of scholarly communications. To date, collecting in real time is the only relatively accurate method to archive tweets at a small scale. Though these datasets have limitations and are not thoroughly systematic, it is hoped they can contribute to developing new insights into the discipline's presence on Twitter over time.  

No sensitive nor confidential information is contained in these datasets.

Please refer to each dataset's description for more information on methodology and other important information.

Shared for educational and archival use.

In many cases the CC-BY  CC-BY license has been applied to thes outputs in this collection as they are curated datasets. Authorial/curatorial/collection work has been performed on the file in order to make it available as part of the scholarly record. The data contained in the deposited files is otherwise freely available elsewhere through different methods and anyone not wishing to attribute the data to the creators of who have created and deposited the outputs containint the data is needless to say free to do their own collection and clean their own data.