history and social media

frédéric clavert

  1. Why archiving tweets?

  2. Case studies

  3. The different ways to collect tweets

Why archiving and analysing tweets?

Tweets are primary sources

They can help understand

  • how people engage with history and the past
  • how collective memories develop
  • how events (incl. social movements) unfold

Archived, they will help understand the past.

About this tweet, see: Joshua Sternfeld, « Historical Understanding in the Quantum Age », Journal of Digital Humanities, 3-2, 2014.

Anonymised tweets from the night of the Bataclan attacks

Tweet from the night of the Bataclan attack, with the #portesouvertes hashtag

Why Twitter?

Because we can (could?)

  • Facebook / instagram data is hard to collect.
  • Whatsapp / Snapchat are impossible to collect.

An application programming interface(API) is a computing interface which defines interactions between multiple software intermediaries.

source: wikipedia

Pitfalls

Who are we studying when collecting and analysing Twitter data?

  • the demographics of Twitter is complicated (if not impossible) to understand
  • the diversity of Twitter accounts
    • people, institutions, groups, bots, etc.

What do we study with Twitter?


  • Information circulation (memetics) where information is understood in a very wide meaning.

Dominique Boullier, « Big data challenges for the social sciences: from society and opinion to replications », arXiv:1607.05034 [cs], 2016.


  • Practices

Case studies

ww1 and #covid19

Engaging with the past

the Centenary of the First World War

  • Unique series of commemoration
  • 2014-2018
  • Throughout Europe and North America

9 millions+ tweets collected