“Preserving the Voices of Revolution”

I have a paper out this month in the American Archivist with my friend and former UT Austin colleague Tim Arnold. The paper centers on best practices for collecting and preserving a collection of tweets, and looks specifically at a collection culled during the protests in Tahrir Square in early 2011. We dig into the difficulties of scoping search terms and users (in the context of the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 and more generally), the constraints of the Twitter API, and how to contextualize the harvesting of thousands of tweets through that API.

Many thanks to the original researchers for collecting the data and to the American Archivist for their interest in the paper.

Preserving the Voices of Revolution: Examining the Creation and Preservation of a Subject-Centered Collection of Tweets from the Eighteen Days in Egypt (SAA) (CU Scholar)