REJECTED

I applied for Twitter Academic Access. I was rejected. There is no appeal process, and no insight into the rationale for the denial other than this email. If you reply to the email asking for more insight into the reason for the denial, you get an autoresponse stating, “Auto-Response: This email address does not process replies. You will not receive a response. Should you have questions regarding your Twitter Developer account, please refer to our forums at TwitterCommunity.com. Thank you.”

Academic Research Access Application Email

I can’t help having some feelings of embarrassment and shame. I’m also annoyed, frustrated, and at the same time just a big ol’ meh shrug emoji. I have a lot of complicated feelings about the platform, and haven’t really engaged with using it for the last 5 years other than API work. But, I still think there is value in the data that can be extracted, and how that data intersects with a lot of my research projects. That’s why I applied for Academic Access. That said, I know I shouldn’t have these feelings of shame and embarrassment, but I do because I’ve been working with a few of the Twitter APIs for 10 years now. I’ve done a lot of collecting and analysis. I’ve collaborated with colleagues from a variety of academic disicplines, and published on the results of those collaborations. I naively thought that this would be an easy process for me. Privilege, eh?

So, I figured I share my story. Not in a demand to speak with the manager, but to shed some light on the process and it’s opaqueness, as well as just getting this out there for any others that have dealt with this. Solidarity in commiseration I guess?

The process to apply for Academic Research Access appears to be fairly simple. On face value it does. But, when you think about it a bit, you can really second guess yourself or read into things too much. I do give Twitter a lot of credit for the guide that they created. It’s definitely helpful, and informed all of my answers in the process.

So what does the process look like? It’s basically a two page form, with the questions in the guide linked above. I didn’t take any screenshots of it because I honestly didn’t think I would have too, so that’s why there are none here.

The first page in the form is pretty straight forward. Twitters asks for your name as it appears on your institution’s documentation. Then some links, basically demonstrate your academic bona fides: Google Scholar Profile, Faculy directory profile, research project profile, and any other relevant links. Your academic institution; name, country, province, city. Your department, school, or lab name. They also ask your academic role – faculty, graduate student, researcher, etc. Pretty straightforward eh? Below is what I had in my form.

The second page of the form appeared to be pretty straightforward as well. Twitter asks eight questions; the second half of the questions on the guide. The input is standard HTML form text areas. They aren’t overly huge, so I rolled with the assumption they just want a paragraph or two for each entry, 200 words as they state here. Below are the questions and my answers.

What is the name of your research project?

Web Archives for Historical Research, and Archives Unleashed.

Does this project receive funding from outside your academic institution? If yes, please list all your sources of funding.

Yes, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Compute Canada, the Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation, and Science, York University Libraries, Start Smart Labs, and the Faculty of Arts and David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science at the University of Waterloo.

In English, describe your research project.

The Web Archives for Historical Research (WAHR) group as well as the Archives Unleashed Project has the goal of linking history and big data to give historians the tools required to find and interpret digital sources from web archives. Our research focuses on both web histories - writing about the recent past as reflected in web archives - as well as methodological approaches to understanding these repositories. Our team develops web archive search and data analysis tools to enable scholars, librarians and archivists to access, share, and investigate recent history since the early days of the World Wide Web.

In English, describe how Twitter data and/or Twitter APIs will be used in your research project.

As our project’s goal is to use build tools and create datasets to aid other historians, librarians, archivists, and researchers to both use and interpret web archives, we use Twitter data from Twitter APIs to augement web archives. This data provides another lens to view an event or topic, and can also be used a resource to futher develop and create stronger web archives.

Will your research present Twitter data individually or in aggregate?

Aggregate.

In English, describe your methodology for analyzing Twitter data, Tweets, and/or Twitter users.

Our group’s research uses a variety of methods for analysing Twitter data. These methods are largely based on filtering a given dataset in various ways – such as top links, hashtag, images, or tweets – to represent something analogous to a traditional finding aid in the archival profession. Additionally, we also take a look at networks of users around popular tweets in a collection, and use that as an entry point for further analysis that may tell a story. We also have created collages of images for a given event that allows a user to virtually sit in a collection look for patterns. We also use links that are shared as seed list for web crawls to further augment web archive collections. Finally, our group takes great care to respect the Twitter Terms of Service, privacy of users, and ethics guiding our profession.

In English, describe how you will share the outcomes of your research (include tools, data, and/or resources).

In an effort for research reproducibility, the public datasets that we share from raw Twitter API data are Tweet IDs lists which allow a given user to “rehydrate” the data in compliance with Twitter’s Terms of Service. We use twarc to collect data, dehdyrate, and rehydrate. We also use tools we have created to analysis dataset using Apache Spark. Finally, our research output is generally peer reviewed journal articles in our respective academic domains – History, Libraries and Archives, Computer Science, and Digital Humanities – and datasets are shared in platforms such as Canada’s Borealis, or Zenodo.

Will your analysis make Twitter content or derived information available to a government entity?

No.

Once I filled those out, that was it. Click submit, and wait. About 8 hours later, I got the rejection.

The rejection is pretty opaque. I was told my use case was not eligible. I don’t know why it isn’t eligible because they don’t tell you. I don’t know if was a problem with how I answered any of my questions because they don’t tell you. They don’t ask you to expand, or do they tell you that if your answers aren’t to their liking. The denial is simply the end of the process. So, maybe my answers aren’t great, and I’m happy to own that if that’s the case. But, the Kafkaesque process is unsettling, and I’m sitting here with all these weird feelings. Maybe I should inquire over at TwitterCommunity.com and try and get this resolved, or maybe it’s a message to just walk away from this problematic platform.

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Nick Ruest
Associate Librarian

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