Preserving the Voices of Revolution: Examining the Creation and Preservation of a Subject-Centered Collection of Tweets from the Eighteen Days in Egypt

Abstract

In 2011, Hosni Mubarak abdicated his position of president-for-life after peaceful protests across Egypt. Demonstrators in these protests used social media platforms like Twitter to communicate directly with a global audience, but tweets are ephemeral and there are no standards or best practices for their collection and preservation. Using the revolution in Egypt as a case study, this paper serves as a guide to collection developers who are interested in collecting subject-centered collections of tweets. We will discuss how to collect tweets using Twitter's application programming interface (API) as well as collection development issues related to Twitter's role in the Egyptian revolution. These issues include determining the scope of the collection, quantitative and qualitative collection methods, separating signal from noise, and navigating vernacular and formal languages. We will consider the Twitter platform from an archival perspective and discuss best practice in archiving a collection of tweets. To present the kinds of materials that a subject-centered collection of tweets might include, we will conclude with a brief examination of tweets collected during the eighteen-day revolution in Egypt.

Review Essay: What We Talk about When We Talk about Archiving the Web

“…Of course, the topic of web archiving has been no stranger to the pages of American Archivist. Examples abound, such as Timothy Arnold and Walker Sampson's collection development practices for topical social media archives; 16 Brewster Kahle's call for "universal access to all knowledge" in the creation of the Internet Archive; 17 Steven Lubar's analysis of the benefits of hypermedia for archival context; 18 and Margaret Hedstrom's framework for research in electronic records that foreshadowed much of the research to come, right at reviews the dawn of the Web. 19 I highlight these here simply to note the diversity and duration of interest that has come from the journal you are reading now and to invite more to come.…”

Appraisal Practices in Web Archives

“…Duncan & Blumenthal (2016) describe how networks, such as professional consortia, are useful resources for curating seed lists. In addition there has been discussion of the use of social media and their Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) as a means for discovering web content for archiving events such the Arab Spring (Arnold & Sampson, 2014) and the protests in Ferguson and the #Black-LivesMatter social movement (Rollason-Cass & Reed, 2015). Web archives are also considered as a site for critical engagement with issues of social justice (Aronson, 2017).…”

Challenging prevailing narratives with Twitter: An #AustraliaDay case study of participation, representation and elimination of voice in an archive

“…Previous literature in this space mainly discusses the digitisation of non-digital objects (Evens and Hauttekeete, 2011). In regard to the selection and preservation of tweets, Arnold and Sampson (2014) discuss issues around provenance as well as how the method of capture by application level programs (using application programming interfaces (APIs)) produce different result sets from Rest API Search commands. Other technological challenges include technology obsolescence, intellectual property issues, institutional business models and lack of funding (Evens and Hauttekeete, 2011).…”