 in the press RNC 08 Report Preserving Tweets for History's Sake
However, Twitter is by nature ephemeral: One tweet (a single post) is succeeded by another, and another, and another. (For an excellent demonstration of this, visit Twitter's mesmerizing election page, where tweets post, slide down the page and drop off with dizzying speed.) Although you can search Twitter for past tweets, its search engine is not excellent, and makes it hard to capture the flow of the conversation as it occurred. That's problematic if what was said on Twitter was an important part of the unfolding (and public understanding) of an event. For someone looking back at an event such as the RNC for narrative or historical analysis purposes, recapturing the freshness of the tweetstream is a necessity -- and a challenge. But for the 2008 RNC at least, someone is trying. On Oct. 8, Jeff Severns Guntzel wrote in the Minnesota Independent (a site that delivered excellent RNC coverage, in part because of its use of Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools) about an effort by artist/journalist/web designer Nigel Parry to building a crowdsourced online archive of every document relevant to the RNC and the public unrest that surrounded it. Parry's including tweetstreams in the mix. Parry has past experience with crowdsourced reassembling of history: He founded the Electronic Intifada, a citizen journalism site about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Palestinian perspective. But his RNC effort comes from a personal place: He shared lodging during the convention with out-of-town indy filmmakers who were preemptively detained by police before the convention began. His new site, RNC '08 Report, currently includes an archive of 239 documents and is actively soliciting anything that might be relevant -- from personal recollections to academic research to copies of mainstream media text, video and audio. "It's the widest possible range of sources because that's what will be the most helpful" to understanding the civil unrest and law enforcement's reaction, Parry told Guntzel. "The goal is clarity." Related Links 
more from this section  • Pittsburgh's Mellon Green finally unoccupied, Bill Vidonic, Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Thursday, February 9th, 2012  • The revolution will be televised, streamed and uploaded, Amanda Lin Costa, European Journalism Centre, Thursday, January 26th, 2012 • Living our Lives project: Nigel Parry, Patrick Young, LivingOurLives.net, Friday, January 13th, 2012 • 'It's All Political': Eviction and Arrests of Global Revolution Livestreamers Part of Pattern of Crackdowns on Alternative Living, Kristen Gwynne, AlterNet, Wednesday, January 4th, 2012 • Occupy Livestream Operators Will Be Homeless After They Get Out of Jail, Adam Martin, The Atlantic Wire, Wednesday, January 4th, 2012 • Off the grid: Occupy Pittsburgh gets charged up the natural way, Darlene White Natale, Point Park News Service, Sunday, November 6th, 2011 • #OccupyPGH Day 1: Interview with Global Revolution's Nigel Parry, Eric Byler, Coffee Party, Saturday, October 15th, 2011 • Facts and myths in the WikiLeaks/Guardian saga, Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com, Friday, September 2nd, 2011 |
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