When the Nobel Committee announced that President Obama would receive the peace prize, how many tweets did that produce? 90,000. When Oprah announced that she would end her TV program when the contract was completed, were there more or fewer than the Obama tweets? Fewer. 73,000 fewer. How many tweets have there been about health care reform (#hcr)? Over 600,000.

Using The Archivist In Class

In the fall of 2009, I wanted to teach two courses about politically oriented messages on Twitter. My students were going to be the first in the country to have an entire course devoted to this subject. But there was a problem: how could we learn how many tweets there were about Obama receiving the Peace Prize? And anything else we might want to know?

It was difficult to find a solution. There are many systems for searching Twitter, including Twitter itself, which allows you to enter a search term and watch the tweets flow by. But we needed a system that would not only search for tweets, but also count, collect and export them. It turned out that The Archivist was the only system that could do the job.

Politics On Twitter

Many believe that Twitter messages are largely about the concerns of an individual. They interest a few friends, but have little wider interest. That may be true of most messages,but my students found that politically oriented tweets aren’t like that at all; People interested in politics circulate a lot of ideas,and those ideas are as likely to come from outside Twitter as in. URLs are much more frequently found in politically-oriented twitter messages than in other kinds of messages.

Even more convincing: Twitter was the tool of choice for celebrating President Obama’s election in the fall of 2008. The number of tweets about his inaugural address in 2009 broke every record up to that point.

By studying Twitter, my students were able to explore a lot of politics—comparing members of congress tweeting with members of the British House of Commons, for example. What they did was only possible because of The Archivist. And the new web version is going to be even better.

note website on Bob’s computer :)