Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery Since 2002

Archivists are cataloguing every tweet, article spreadsheet #MeToo movement has ever produced

Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library is preserving the history in case it disappears from the internet – The Challenge of Preserving the Historical Record of #MeToo..

The archivists use a tool, created at George Washington University and called Social Feed Manager, to perform weekly downloads of roughly fifty hashtags, which capture both trending conversations (#MuteRKelly) and sector-specific ones (#MeTooMedicine, #TimesUpTech), and also the parallel universe of counter-denunciations that collect under banners like #MeTooLiars and #IStandWithBrett. On the day of my visit, they scrolled through the latest haul of tweets from the evangelical #ChurchToo movement to demonstrate how the app creates spreadsheets of the posts’ metadata (information such as the number of retweets, the number of followers, and geolocation, if user-enabled). Twitter’s A.P.I. permits this kind of free mass download for the first week or so after a post appears on the Web, and the library is working with the company to purchase the nearly nineteen million tweets from the first year of the hashtags’ use…”

Sorry, comments are closed for this post.