How do you do historical research with Twitter? The answer is use Sifter to search and filter every (un-deleted) Tweet in history.
See our Sifter FAQ for more information.
Sifter: Search Every Tweet
Twitter for Research
Final preparations are underway to travel to Lyon, France to offer a DiscoverText workshop at “Twitter for Research” hosted by the Emlyon B-School April 22-24. There is a very strong program and this promises to be a great event. As the organizers note, the meeting will take place “avec la participation de speakers de Twitter.” To keep track of the events, follow #twlyon2015.
Historical Twitter Prize Winners
Texifter’s most recent historical Twitter prize winners include three from the United States, one from Great Britain, and one from France. Winners receive Enterprise access to DiscoverText for six months, and Sifter credit for up to three historical Twitter days and 200,000 tweets. The following is a snapshot of the most recent winners and their proposed research projects. Diana Ascher PhD student in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA @dianaascher “Helping Companies Streamline Information” Ascher proposes exploring cultural time orientation by analyzing the Twitter feeds from three news organizations to better understand how “information agents’ cultural backgrounds affect corporate information practice,” and specifically how organizations decide what information to share and when. Ascher hopes the research will help businesses streamline their information activity and routines, and help managers understand “how employees decide what’s important and what’s not.” Stephen Barnard Assistant Professor in the Sociology Department at St. Lawrence University @socsavvy “Better Understanding Journalism via Boston Marathon Bombing Twitter Data” Barnard plans to use Sifter to collect and analyze Twitter data about the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. He will use Twitter’s PowerTrack filters to conduct a detailed search of Tweets that reported on the bombing, and compare the results to the responses from professional and citizen journalists. “I hope to gain a better understanding of the reporting processes and outcomes emerging from both groups,” Barnard writes, adding that he will use the findings to “highlight the structural relations of the emerging journalistic field.” Oliver Haimson PhD Student in the Informatics Department at University of California, Irvine @oliverhaimson “Analyzing Hashtags” Haimson’s plans to use the prize to analyze the hashtags #nymwars and #mynameis, which were used in 2011 and 2014 to critique Google’s and Facebook’s “real name” policies. He plans to evaluate the Twitter data from these two hashtags “using computational linguistics, qualitative coding, and social network analysis.” Omar Jaafor PhD Student in the Department of Operational Research, Applied Statistics and Simulation at University of Technology of Troyes @lmhasher “Developing Algorithms for Social Networks” Jaafor and fellow researchers will use the prize to continue to develop “clustering and anomaly detection algorithms for social networks in a big data environment.” Wasim Ahmed PhD Student in the Health Informatics Research Group at the University of Sheffield’s Information Department @was3210 ” Responding to Infectious Disease Outbreaks” Ahmed will use his prize to “study how users respond to outbreaks on infectious diseases on social media platforms, such as Twitter.” He plans to use his data towards his PhD “Pandemics and epidemics: User reactions on social media and Web 2.0 platforms.” For more information on the Texifter’s social data offer and text analytics tools, please send us an email info@texifter.com. Better yet, sign up for a free 30-day trial and start collecting your own social data today.
Historical Twitter: Gnip PowerTrack Filter v2
We are making continual improvements to the sifter beta. Our goal is to develop the best possible user interface for Gnip’s PowerTrack filters when searching for historical Twitter data. Version 2 of the historical Twitter filtering system reflects a lot of great input from our early adopters. The work is far from done. This video introduces v2. What we need is your input. How can we make this tool for searching every undeleted tweet in history easier to use? 
Texifter Social Data & Tools June Prize Winners
As a part of getting new users to test our sifter beta, every month this summer we are awarding 12 #datagrants to academics. All you need to do to be included in the July drawing is submit a valid historical Twitter estimate request using sifter and then send us your CV. These prizes shave thousands of dollars of costs off of your research. The June social data and tools prize winners were: Kelly Fincham The Department of Journalism, Media Studies, and Public Relations at Hofstra University
“I will use the data and software prize to further my research and analysis of journalism practice on Twitter. My research agenda explores journalists’ evolving norms and practices on social media, specifically Twitter, in the U.S. and Ireland. This grant will help me to research and analyze this subject area in more depth.” @kellyfincham
Martina Wengenmeir PhD candidate in the Media and Communication Department at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand
“I am hoping to use the data and software prize for my PhD research on the recovery and rebuild after the Christchurch earthquake of 2011. I am particularly interested in framing and sentiment of tweets and am hoping to compare a historical data set during disaster response and recovery to the conversation about the rebuilt of the city which is still ongoing today. I am hoping to study the differences and similarities of conversations on Twitter now and then.” @tinserella
Carmina Godoy Postgraduate student in the Universidad Complutense de Madrid
“I will like to integrate the collected data (tweets) in my final essay in order to get my Masters degree. The subject of my essay is: racism online.” @CarminaGodoy
Warren Allen Assistant Professor at the iSchool at Florida State University
“This award will be used to collect and analyze select data from the early group stages of the 2014 World Cup. Social media – including but not limited to Twitter – are increasingly integrated into traditional (TV, radio, print) media campaigns. At the 2014 World Cup, the hashtags #becausefootball and #becausefutbol were promoted throughout the televising of the games. Exploratory thematic analysis of these Tweets – enabled by Sifter and Discovertext – will describe how the use of these commercially-oriented hashtags are used in comparison to what we know about live event Twitter usage in the current body of research.” @warrensallen
Bryce Newell PhD Student in the Information School at the University of Washington
“I plan to use the prize to capture and analyze online discussion and commentary about police use of automated license plate recognition (ALPR) systems and wearable cameras. In particular, I hope to examine discussions related to the public disclosure of data generated by these systems under freedom of information laws.” @newmedialaw
Jae Eun Chung Assistant Professor in the School of Communications at Howard University
“This project will survey the current use of online social media by health organization for health campaign and analyze the reach and diffusion of campaign messages. Despite the ever growing number of online social media-based health campaigns, little work has been done to understand how interactive natures of online social media are used for public health promotion. For this project, Twitter data will be analyzed to enhance our understanding of how health organizations use social media for public health promotion and how such uses of online media platforms are received by the public.”
Abhay Gupta Lecturer at Fairleigh Dickinson University
“I plan to use it to understand the dynamics of public opinion. In particular, I want to test various hypotheses on how major events (e.g. election wins, market crash, sports results) impact the sentiment and whether pre-event opinion analysis has any predictive power in explaining actual outcomes.” @EmpForesights
Victor Barger Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater
“I am looking forward to using the Texifter data and software to investigate how consumers and brands communicate on social media. In particular, I’m interested in how language use affects consumer behavior in online contexts. Given the extent to which consumers have and are continuing to adopt social media, this research should have important implications for marketing practitioners.” @vabarger
Jamie Baxter Assistant Professor in the Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie University
“I am studying the influence of social movements on changes in the law — specifically land law. I hope to use the prize to access Twitter data that can tell me about the relationships between movement actors, how they form their interests, and how these change over time.” @jrgbaxter
Stephen Jeffares Professor in the School of Government and Society at the University of Birmingham
“I will use the software and data to continue my study of the lifecycle of policy initiatives. I used DiscoverText in my latest book Interpreting Hashtag Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Historic Twitter data reveals the first mention of policies that enjoy several months of widespread attention before disappearing without trace. To understand why and how this occurs, I will continue use DiscoverText to de-duplicate the dat
a and develop thematic code sets with a team of research assistants.” @SRJeffares
Cristian Vaccari Lecturer in Politics at the Royal Holloway University of London
“I am planning on using the data and software to analyze how politically motivated users of social media engage with mediated political events, such as televised leader debates and high-profile interviews, to better understand the interplay between television and social media in the flow of political messages.” 25lettori
Bill D. Herman Remember: All you need to do to be included in the July drawing is submit a valid historical Twitter estimate request using sifter and then send us your CV.
