5 ms·

While this is not intrinsically fascinating to me (or, I imagine, most people, regardless of their feelings toward Mr Romney), I find it an extremely good examp

While this is not intrinsically fascinating to me (or, I imagine, most people, regardless of their feelings toward Mr Romney), I find it an extremely good example of the new types of data historians will get to use in the future. I keep imagining Ken Burns ominously reciting Facebook Like figures, or trending Twitter hashtags, in addition to statistics on how many bombs were dropped in Iraq: "As Romney exited the political arena, public awareness of how close he came to the presidency seemed to erode, at a rate of over 550 likes-per-hour, he soon faded into the sunset of the American political landscape ...". Obviously this is an exceedingly simple example, akin to the first steps in distributed computing like a Wikipedia wordcount, but I would love to see more sophisticated historical analyses in the near future.

bdcravens 14y ago
Romney already declared he was done running for public office if he lost, even before the election's end. I'm sure that has more to do with his fading into the sunset.
- notatoad 14y ago
  Im not sure 'fading into the sunset' is the right term. this is people logging in to Facebook and actively seeking out his facebook page to rescind their like. Just because he lost. People aren't forgetting Romney, they are trying to erase their history of supporting him.
  - pbreit 14y ago
    Not necessarily. You can unlike from newsfeed and Romney has posted a few post-election items.
  - SkyMarshal 14y ago
    >they are trying to erase their history of supporting him. That's not necessarily the case. More likely they just don't want updates anymore. I don't think any of his supporters are particularly ashamed of supporting him.
    - notatoad 14y ago
      Ah, it's been a few years since I logged into Facebook. If a like is analogous to a twitter follow, then this is a lot less interesting than how I was interpreting it.
      - Narretz 14y ago
        They could just unsubscribe from his updates, no need to unlike.
        corin_ 14y ago
        But it's also possible that people no longer consider him important enough to be a part of their profile, without actually changing their view of him. People manage to clog up their profiles in a short period of time already, imagine what your FB account might look like in ten years if you never un-like that politician you supported, that band that you loved for a few months, that special edition chocolate bar you couldn't stop buying...
        jacalata 14y ago
        the only real way to make this graph informative is to show it right alongside an obama likes graph.
andyjohnson0 14y ago
"I find it an extremely good example of the new types of data historians will get to use in the future." Potentially, but I have two concerns about this. First, I'm not familiar with the facebook api, but does it does it provide a way to determine an account's like count retrospectively? Or does this kind of analysis rely on scraping pages over the time-period of the analysis? Put it another way, could a historian in twenty years time reproduce this data, or does it have to be collected now because no historically useful record is kept? I suspect that online sources actually leave much less historically useful data than, say, newspapers on microfiche, despite online data being much easier to analyse. And secondly, what happens to the data if/when facebook or twitter or google disappear or merge or change massively. As commercial entities, none of them are in the historical data business for anything other than short-term commercial gain. They have no obligation to the more distant future. I wonder what historians think about everything going digital?

bdcravens 14y ago

Romney already declared he was done running for public office if he lost, even before the election's end. I'm sure that has more to do with his fading into the sunset.

notatoad 14y ago
Im not sure 'fading into the sunset' is the right term. this is people logging in to Facebook and actively seeking out his facebook page to rescind their like. Just because he lost. People aren't forgetting Romney, they are trying to erase their history of supporting him.
- pbreit 14y ago
  Not necessarily. You can unlike from newsfeed and Romney has posted a few post-election items.
- SkyMarshal 14y ago
  >they are trying to erase their history of supporting him. That's not necessarily the case. More likely they just don't want updates anymore. I don't think any of his supporters are particularly ashamed of supporting him.
  - notatoad 14y ago
    Ah, it's been a few years since I logged into Facebook. If a like is analogous to a twitter follow, then this is a lot less interesting than how I was interpreting it.
    - Narretz 14y ago
      They could just unsubscribe from his updates, no need to unlike.
      - corin_ 14y ago
        But it's also possible that people no longer consider him important enough to be a part of their profile, without actually changing their view of him. People manage to clog up their profiles in a short period of time already, imagine what your FB account might look like in ten years if you never un-like that politician you supported, that band that you loved for a few months, that special edition chocolate bar you couldn't stop buying...
        jacalata 14y ago
        the only real way to make this graph informative is to show it right alongside an obama likes graph.

andyjohnson0 14y ago

"I find it an extremely good example of the new types of data historians will get to use in the future." Potentially, but I have two concerns about this. First, I'm not familiar with the facebook api, but does it does it provide a way to determine an account's like count retrospectively? Or does this kind of analysis rely on scraping pages over the time-period of the analysis? Put it another way, could a historian in twenty years time reproduce this data, or does it have to be collected now because no historically useful record is kept? I suspect that online sources actually leave much less historically useful data than, say, newspapers on microfiche, despite online data being much easier to analyse. And secondly, what happens to the data if/when facebook or twitter or google disappear or merge or change massively. As commercial entities, none of them are in the historical data business for anything other than short-term commercial gain. They have no obligation to the more distant future. I wonder what historians think about everything going digital?