A number of people have expressed interest in having a collection of everything that was Tweeted at Computers and Writing 2009 with the #cw09 hashtag. However, because there were more than 1500 Tweets from the conference (!), it is not possible for any one person to archive all of the Tweets.
If we are going to have such an archive, it will take a community effort. And fast–we have less than a day or two to do this.
First, here’s what you should do (I’ll explain why next): go to your favorite, feed-enabled Web browser and enter this URL, replacing USERNAME with your Twitter username and PAGE with a number starting with 1 and increasing it by one until you no longer have any results left:
http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=%23cw09&rpp=100&from=USERNAME&page=PAGE
Each time you run this query, right-click and choose View Page Source; in a good browser, you will see the raw XML (and not the styled HTML page that browsers like Safari and Firefox generate for RSS). Your ATOM/RSS will look something like this (my most recent 100 #cw09 tweets).
Copy that entire chunk of source by right-clicking and choosing Select All, and paste it into a good text editor: either WordPad on Windows (*not* Notepad) or TextEdit on Mac. (In TextEdit, choose Format > Make Plain Text if it’s trying to save as RTF.)
Save the file as like username-cw09-page-1.rss.txt for the first page, username-cw09-page-2.rss.txt for the second page, and so on. Because of the way XML works, do not paste all of your results into a single file; keep a separate file for each time you up the page number in the URL.
We’ll have to figure out as a community where to share and post these files, and how to (eventually) get them into a searchable, sharable database as an SQL file. But for now, just be sure to grab your Tweets, save them, and keep them safe.
The reason this is necessary is that Twitter will only return 1500 results for a given search (like #cw09), and it will only return results that are less than roughly a week old. So that’s why we have to do this individually, and do it fast. After sometime on Thursday of this week, the Tweets from during the conference will rapidly begin to disappear from the searchable Tweet stream.
4 Responses to “Save Your Tweets from Computers and Writing 2009”
Hey Karl,
Thanks for the directions and your digital archiving sk1llZZZ. Here are my tweets for all to see (just one page): https://mywebspace.wisc.edu/avee/ftp/advee77-cw09-page-1.rss.txt
\m/
-A
[...] with the DH09 twapperkeeper: the start date is after the conference began. They refer to “Save Your Tweets from Computers and Writing 2009 – source/literacy.” It describes essentially the same method i used for JCDL, but limiting to one’s own [...]
I have 1509 #cw09-tagged tweets stored. Earliest one is just before midnight on June 18th, so I have the bulk of the tweeted conference _that was tagged_. I saved the following values via the api: lang,src,screen name,text,creation time,to_user,from_user,in_reply_to_user. so…we can do some analysis or archiving or..whatever. I can export however anyone wants.
Note: it doesn’t include tweets that people at #cw09 tweeted w/o hashtag, so that’s where personal data grabbing would come into play. I could look at the archive and see who tweeted with the hashtag, then go grab ALL their tweets, but that seems a little privacy-iffy. I could easily throw a little form interface around the script so that people could enter their username and add to the archive, or…something else? Maybe if there were a specific plan to do something, people would be more apt to add their stuff to the db?
[...] during the Computers & Writing 2009 conference, Karl Stolley wrote a post asking everyone to save their tweets tagged with #cw09. His post provided instructions for the non-scripting way for archiving tweets: [...]
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