politics

Exploring #elxn44 Twitter Data

Introduction This is my third time collecting tweets for a Canadian Federal Election, and will most likely be last. The changes to the Twitter API including the Academic Research product track, twarc2, and great Documenting the Now Slack have considerbly lowered the barrier to collecting and analyizing Twitter data. I’m proud of the work I’ve done over the last seven years collecting and analyizing tweets. I hope it provided a solid implementation pattern for others to be build on in the future!

Exploring #elxn43 Twitter Data

Introduction A few years ago Library Archives Canada, Ian Milligan and I collected tweets from the 42nd Canadian Federal Election. Ian and wrote up a case study in Code4Lib Journal that took a look at the collection process, exploration of the dataset, and some context. This past fall, the 43rd Canadian Federal Election occurred, and we collected tweets again. Instead of writing up the entire process for a journal publication again, I figured I’d revisit some of the methods we used last time to have a look at the dataset, and share some new methods I’ve picked up since then.

14,478,518 WomensMarch tweets January 12-28, 2017

Overview A couple Saturday mornings ago, I was on the couch listening to records and reading a book when Christina Harlow and MJ Suhonos asked me about collecting #WomensMarch tweets. Little did I know at the time #WomensMarch would be the largest volume collection I have ever seen. By the time I stopped collecting a week later, we’d amassed 14,478,518 unique tweet ids from 3,582,495 unique users, and at one point hit around 1 million tweets in a single hour.