big data

17,525,913 images tweeted at Donald Trump

Juxta A couple years ago I wrote about a method for creating a collage out of 1.2M images collected from the 2015 Canadian Federal Election Twitter dataset. That method was very resource intensive in terms of the amount of temporary disk storage required to create the collage. As the number of images in a given collage increased, the amount of temporary disk space scaled exponentially; 3.5T for 1.2M #exln42 images, and ~90T for 6.

A Quick Benchmark of Webarchive-Discovery

This past week Compute Canada provided us with resources to setup our Solr Cloud instance for WALK and Archives Unleashed. We were able to get things setup relatively quickly thanks to a bit of preparation and practice on our local machines in the previous weeks. Once everything was setup (5 virtual machines total; 4 Solr Cloud nodes and one indexer – details below), we started benchmarking webarchive-discovery and our Solr Cloud setup with GNU Parallel.

The Archives Unleashed Project: Warcbase is dead, long live the Toolkit

by Ian Milligan, Jimmy Lin, and Nick Ruest We were delighted to be able to announce a few months ago that our project team at the University of Waterloo and York University were awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to make petabytes of historical internet content accessible to scholars and others interested in researching the recent past. Since that announcement, we’ve been busy at work at a few different things: modernizing and updating our Warcbase web archiving analytics platform, working on a discovery interface and underlying infrastructure, and laying the administrative groundwork for the project itself.

1,203,867 elxn42 images

Background Last August, I began capturing the #elxn42 hashtag as an experiment, and potential research project with Ian Milligan. Once Justin Trudeau was sworn in as the 23rd Prime Minister of Canada, we stopped collection, and began analysing the dataset. We wrote that analysis up for the Code4Lib Journal, which will be published in the next couple weeks. In the interim, you can check out our pre-print here. Included in that dataset is a line-deliminted list of a url to every embedded image tweeted in the dataset; 1,203,867 images.