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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
Potential of Twitter Archives
Thomas Altmann

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
“Twitter helps you create and share ideas and
information instantly, without barriers.” (Twitter 2014)
Source: https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/266031293945503744

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
Table of Contents
• Overview
• TweetCollector
• TwitterStat
• Demo
• Conclusion

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
Twitter
• Tweets
• Mentions
• Retweets
• Hashtags

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
Twitter Research
• Existing scientific research
– JAVA 2007, BOYD 2010
• Social network analysis
• Wealth of data
• Limited access

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
Research Questions
• What value can tweet archives provide?
• What value can the context of a tweet analysis
provide?

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
Problems
• Retrieving old tweets
– Search: no older than six to nine days
– Users: no older than 3200 tweets
• Search does not find all tweets
– Only most popular

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
Twitter APIs
• REST API
– Individual requests
– Rate limited
– Used for search and user timelines
• Streaming API
– Single persistent connection
– Set parameters
– Constant real-time stream

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
TweetCollector - Purpose
• Collect tweets
– Containing certain words/hashtags
– From certain users
• Provide access to stored tweets
– Basic web interface
– Archives accessible through API

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
TweetCollector - Implementation
• Server-side
– PHP/MySQL
– Uses Twitter Streaming API and REST API
– Provides API to access stored tweets
• Client-side
– HTML/CSS/JavaScript
– Create and delete archives
– Start and stop archiving

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
Structure of Tools
Source: Own depiction

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
TwitterStat - Purpose
• Twitter Analysis Tool
• Analyze TweetCollector archives
• Show most active users, most used words/hashtags,
…
• Provide context by linking original tweets

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
TwitterStat - Questions
Source: Own depiction

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
TwitterStat - Answers
• Possible Answer
• Ordered List of results
• Every result is a link

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
TwitterStat - Context
• Back to tweets
• Check original tweets responsible for results
• Provide context for analysis

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
TwitterStat - API
• Access to analysis results
• Machine-readable format
• Possibility of further usage, e.g. visualization

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
TwitterStat - Visualization
Source: Own depiction

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
LIVE DEMO

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
Results
• What value can tweet archives provide?
– Access to tweets too old to be found by Twitter
– Analysis needs large corpus of tweets
– API to build applications using tweet archives
• What value can the context of a tweet analysis
provide?
– Determine content and sentiment of original tweets
– Check if insights gained from analysis correspond with original
tweets
– See tweets as part of a larger conversation

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
Conclusion
• Goal: Show potential of Twitter archives
• Developed: TweetCollector for archiving
• Developed: TwitterStat for analysis
• Showed: Value in tweet archives and analysis

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
Thank You!

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Thomas Altmann Graz, 3.7.2014 Potential of Twitter Archives
References
A. JAVA, X. SONG, T. FININ, B. TSENG. Why we
Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and
Communities. Presented at the Proceedings of the
9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD 2007 workshop on
Web mining and social network analysis (2007), 56–
65.
D. BOYD, S. GOLDER, G. LOTAN. Tweet, Tweet,
Retweet: Conversational Aspects of Retweeting on
Twitter. Presented at the Proceedings of the 43rd
Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
(2010), Hawaii.