WTF?

[unixronin]

This is one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard:  The Library of Congress has just added a digital archive of the entirety of public traffic on Twitter since its founding four years ago.

WTF FOR?!?

Comments

[otherbill.livejournal.com]

I'm betting it doesn't take up nearly as much space as people might expect.

(As for why...why, because they can, of course! :-/

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

At 140 bytes per tweet, I imagine it is fairly compact. :)

(Well, 140 bytes plus overhead ... no telling how much the overhead is)

[lblanchard.livejournal.com]

I agree with otherbill that it is probably not terribly space-intensive. Additionally, it will document a potentially culture-changing shift in communications, which will be fodder for countless dissertations in a few decades.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

It's a shift in communications, sure. I strongly question whether it's a good one. I think Twitter would only have been possible in this age of ADD and sound-bites.

At least with all the traffic there in the archive, with any luck there is some kind of vague semblance of context.

[databeast.livejournal.com]

a good percentage of the ancient writings we value for their insight into history, are hardly what would be considered 'valuable' at the time.

hell, a great percentage of our knowledge of ancient cultures, comes from linguistic remnants 5000 year old street graffiti.

Understanding a culture is rarely something achieved through the narrow lens of academic record and official records, sometimes you must go to the people.

Today? worthless

Ten centuries from today? (yeah, I know, I know) future academics would probably be clawing each other's eyes out to get their hands on this.

[rain-manpnw.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this one has me shaking my head, too.

OTOH, they've also asked Groklaw if they wish to be included in the same archival project.

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100406141939511

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Interesting ...

I wonder what else is being considered for inclusion?

[rosencrantz23.livejournal.com]

this is what happens when librarians try to apply their maxims of data preservation indiscriminately.

I've been seeing this in various forms while at library school the past two years: "we must find ways to make libraries web2.0 compatible! Put everything on a wiki! add a social networking overlay to the catalog! Rewrite the entire cataloging rules to account for electronic materials!" and so on.

The sad part is, charging in blindly ignores one of the fundamental principles of collection development: Find a fscking information need, FIRST. THEN build a collection to satisfy it.

Ranganathan's laws of library science may say "Every reader his book" and "Every book its reader", but those apply to the people using the collection. Ranganathan's laws also say "Books are for use" and "Libraries are growing organisms". If the books (and by extension, anything else in the collection) aren't being used, they should be weeded out to make room for ones that WILL be used. If there isn't an identifiable group wanting to use a new resource, don't allocate funds and space for it.

I ought to rant about this on my lj; it's been a while since I've put something in 025 R7239....

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I see it in part as a failure to distinguish between collecting and organizing information, and accumulating random data for the sake of accumulating data. Even if one can find and track the context, 99% of twitter is ephemeral babble, not only of consequence only to the speaker and a relatively small number of listeners, but relevant strictly to that particular moment in time. Taken as a whole, sans context-of-the-moment, its overall signal-to-noise ratio surely has to be asymptotically approaching zero.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Sure, but see the point Databeast made above.

That said, I hope the archeaologists of 9,000 AD have awesomely, brilliantly, incredibly good data-mining software.

Because at the rate we've been packing away information for them these last few centuries (and *especially* these last couple of decades), they're damned well going to need it.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That said, I hope the archeaologists of 9,000 AD have awesomely, brilliantly, incredibly good data-mining software.

I'll have to remind TTK to leave a set on long-term archival media for them. ;)

[wyrdling.livejournal.com]

i want to find out if it's all twitter messages, or just public ones...

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

All public messages, according to the article.

[guppiecat]

Yes, but it's unclear as to "public as of when". If I delete my twitter account, will they be archived, or is it too late?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Quite honestly, I haven't a clue.

[guppiecat]

It doesn't matter much to me personally. I presume that everything I say online has the chance to be archived forever. Since I've been online since I was 14, there's quite a bit of idiocy out there.

I take comfort in the fact that I seem to generally be less idiotic than many other Internet users.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

"I don't have to outrun the lion, I just have to outrun you." :)

[randwolf.livejournal.com]

Surely that is an archive of historical interest? What makes it a bad idea?

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Where is the context to go with it? A lot of Twitter seems to be pointers to websites using shorteners like bit.ly and goo.gl. If we don't have that context anymore, what's the point?

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

Who says we won't also have the context? One assumes that the Library of Congress also has its own mirror of the Wayback Machine, or at least one on private file.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Actually, I rather doubt that it does. Do you have any idea of the sheer engineering scale of the Internet Archive? The Archive developed proprietary hardware platforms for the job. The name "Petabox" should give you a hint. (http://www.archive.org/web/petabox.php)

(Yeah, I know a guy who used to be one of the top engineers at the Archive, who was involved in designing the petaboxes, before he gave up dealing with Brewster Kahle's irrationality.)

[rain-manpnw.livejournal.com]

I thought a PETAbox was something about 6'x2'x2', and used for long-term storage of idiots.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Heh. Wishful thinking, I'm afraid. :)

"They're supposed to be dead first, you know. Though I suppose, in this case, I'd be willing to make an exception."

[lwj2.livejournal.com]

I don't have a Twitter account and this is one more reason not to have one.

I wonder if No Such Agency and GCHQ are going nuts with Twitter.