5 ms·

Do we need to preserve every tweet, though? The important ones get mentioned in articles and other places. 99% is just noise, although I guess it would be int

Do we need to preserve every tweet, though? The important ones get mentioned in articles and other places. 99% is just noise, although I guess it would be interesting for future people to listen in. It doesn't seem that important of a thing to preserve though. Sure, if we could hear daily conversations of people from the year 1000 we'd learn a lot. But that's only because we don't have access to much other cultural information from back then, unlike what we'll have now with webpages and news articles.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago
99% may just be "noise", but that doesn't mean it's not worth preserving. Excluding an entire medium from preservation would be horrible for future research.
- lifeformed 12y ago
  I don't see what makes Twitter worth preserving any more than everyday conversation, or packaging labels, or billboards, or whatever other junk information there is. Just because it would be somewhat easier to do preserve a digital thing doesn't make it more important to, does it? I mean I'm sure it'll be helpful to a subset of researchers. But I don't see why it's Twitter's fault for not making it easy to preserve, as much as it is Microsoft's fault for not preserving WordArt bake sale announcements.
saraid216 12y ago
Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Track the evolution of online language as a consequence of Twitter between the years 2001 and 2100. Which tweets are just noise now?
- gknoy 12y ago
  I'm not sure if you are joking, but I have a linguist friend who mines Twitter for things like evolving language usage. She shares some pretty interesting things that she learns from it, too. I expect that being able to do that with a hundred-year (or multi-decade) corpus could be really interesting.
EpicEng 12y ago
The fact that so many people are wasting relatively large amounts of time producing "noise" is historically relevant.
- lifeformed 12y ago
  But we won't need all the noise itself to learn that fact.
joshu 12y ago
It must be nice to be able to know what will be important in the future.

TazeTSchnitzel 12y ago

99% may just be "noise", but that doesn't mean it's not worth preserving. Excluding an entire medium from preservation would be horrible for future research.

lifeformed 12y ago
I don't see what makes Twitter worth preserving any more than everyday conversation, or packaging labels, or billboards, or whatever other junk information there is. Just because it would be somewhat easier to do preserve a digital thing doesn't make it more important to, does it? I mean I'm sure it'll be helpful to a subset of researchers. But I don't see why it's Twitter's fault for not making it easy to preserve, as much as it is Microsoft's fault for not preserving WordArt bake sale announcements.

saraid216 12y ago

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: Track the evolution of online language as a consequence of Twitter between the years 2001 and 2100. Which tweets are just noise now?

gknoy 12y ago
I'm not sure if you are joking, but I have a linguist friend who mines Twitter for things like evolving language usage. She shares some pretty interesting things that she learns from it, too. I expect that being able to do that with a hundred-year (or multi-decade) corpus could be really interesting.

EpicEng 12y ago

The fact that so many people are wasting relatively large amounts of time producing "noise" is historically relevant.

lifeformed 12y ago
But we won't need all the noise itself to learn that fact.

joshu 12y ago

It must be nice to be able to know what will be important in the future.