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Library of Congress To Archive All Public Tweets
After the recent announcement that Groklaw will be archived at the Library of Congress, mjn writes with word that the push to archive more digital content continues: "The US Library of Congress announced a deal with Twitter to archive all public tweets, dating back to Twitter's inception in March 2006. More details at their blog. No word yet on precisely what will be done with the collection, but besides entering your friends' important updates on the quality of breakfast into the permanent archival record, the deal may improve access for researchers wanting to analyze and mine Twitter's giant database."
Given the signal to noise ratio for most tweets, I'm not convinced this is a particularly good use of resources...
Just because you can do something, doesn't mean you have to!
American Third Position
Finally, a real choice!
Clearly, once they've finished, they plan to destroy the entire world so that they can claim to have truly archived all human knowledge, forever.
I'm thinking the byte limit on tweets is the main factor here...easier to just scoop 'em all up than to figure how to get the "important" ones.
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!
all of them???
Disk space is cheap...
They should get a copy of the internet archive while they're at it.
http://twitter.com/mzzt/status/12179834899
It had to be done.
I suspect a lot of the interesting information is in the aggregate anyway, not individual tweets: things like trends, analysis of subgroups, linguistic analysis, etc.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I know you are joking, but this kind of stuff is actually very important to historians. For example, the only reason we are able to reconstruct how many hours a day people worked in the medieval era is by looking at court records - the judge will ask things like "what were you doing at five" and the person will respond with answers like "eating" or "sleeping" or "working", and by going though a lot of court records, we were able to guess at how people lived back then.
This will allow the historian of the future to guess much more accurately.
Math for the day:
Without compression, all tweets in human history will fit on a single hard drive costing less than $100.
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=a (to find the latest tweet number)
http://twitter.com/about (character limit)
http://www.pricewatch.com/hard_removable_drives/ (1.5TB drive)Delete
http://www.google.com/buzz/fulldecent/18tfNfPHSBp/Math-for-the-day-Without-compression-all-tweets-in
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
They were probably too busy watching Medieval Idol to even realize who Shakespeare or the King was ;)
A jest, I know, but it does demonstrate a serious point.
Our history books are based on records maintained by the winners of wars, the leaders, the successful, etc. We know a lot about Shakespeare. We know relatively little about how his audiences actually felt about his work.
We largely speculate as to how life was for the ordinary folk during historical periods based on writings about them, not writings from them. The exception to this is diaries, and now many people maintain those any more. Twitter can help replace some of that perspective.
Admittedly, Twitter is not an ideal way to get a picture of a society, but you get to hear historical events told from a very different perspective. Actually, you get to hear them from LOTS of perspectives. They may not be an accurate portrayal of the events, but they are a snapshot of how a society reacts to and perceives events.
Who will represent the narcissists in society for future generations?
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."