Micah Bateman
University of Texas at Austin

October 6, 2018, 9:15am-10:45am, KU Burge Union

In this workshop, participants will install and learn the basics of TWARC, a Python script used to harvest and archive data from Twitter. Many disciplines use social media data. As a literary historian, I use Tweets featuring poems of resistance for reception studies. But only recent Tweets are easy to find using Twitter’s search apparatus, and Tweets are only archived for two years, making the public discourses of resistance movements ephemeral. TWARC makes it easier to search for and archive Twitter data given research parameters. The workshop will begin with an introduction to TWARC through my own research about archiving and preserving #BlackLivesMatter Tweets that intersect with quotations of Black radical poetry. We’ll also discuss the task of archiving Twitter, a task that even the Library of Congress has taken on and quit. Then I’ll walk participants through installing TWARC on Windows and Mac operating systems followed by a number of search exercises, including some directed toward participants’ own research needs.

Bring your own Wifi-enabled laptop.

Enrollment limited to the first 25 registrants. Sign up here