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responding to citation comments in web-archive-group#7
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## Introduction

During the 2015 Canadian federal elections, we captured 3,918,932 tweets written using the #elxn42 hashtag: thoughts on the nature and stature of political candidates or parties, live running commentary during leader debates, exhortations to vote, and witty ripostes or jokes to liven up the long campaign. Political scientists, journalists, and other researchers can use these tweets as evidence of sentiment amongst a certain slice of the electorate: did a policy go over well? Did it not? What tweets get re-tweeted, or further shared, and which ones do not? If these are questions that resonate amongst contemporary researchers, historians are also interested in the long-term preservation of digital material. Tweets, as well as the much broader scope of archived webpages and born-digital data, are the primary sources of tomorrow. Websites and tweets present considerable advantages in that they represent the preservation of material representing the voices of everyday people that might not otherwise be saved, but also considerable challenges in the collection and use of data on such a large scale. If the norm until the digital era was to have human information vanish, "now expectations have inverted. Everything may be recorded and preserved, at least potentially" (Gleick, 2012). Useful historical information is being preserved at mind-boggling rates that continue to accelerate. IBM Research, for example, notes that "every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data --- so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone." (Ainsworth _et al_, 2012)
During the 2015 Canadian federal elections, we captured 3,918,932 tweets written using the #elxn42 hashtag: thoughts on the nature and stature of political candidates or parties, live running commentary during leader debates, exhortations to vote, and witty ripostes or jokes to liven up the long campaign. Political scientists, journalists, and other researchers can use these tweets as evidence of sentiment amongst a certain slice of the electorate: did a policy go over well? Did it not? What tweets get re-tweeted, or further shared, and which ones do not? If these are questions that resonate amongst contemporary researchers, historians are also interested in the long-term preservation of digital material. Tweets, as well as the much broader scope of archived webpages and born-digital data, are the primary sources of tomorrow. Websites and tweets present considerable advantages in that they represent the preservation of material representing the voices of everyday people that might not otherwise be saved, but also considerable challenges in the collection and use of data on such a large scale. If the norm until the digital era was to have human information vanish, "now expectations have inverted. Everything may be recorded and preserved, at least potentially" (Gleick, 2012). Useful historical information is being preserved at mind-boggling rates that continue to accelerate. IBM Research, for example, notes that "every day, we create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data --- so much that 90% of the data in the world today has been created in the last two years alone." (IBM Research, 2016)

This data has the potential to reshape multiple avenues of historical research. In the case of the #elxn42 hashtag, we have access to the tweets of some 318,176 unique users (which would include some bots and spam accounts, of course). Consider what the scale of this dataset means. Social and cultural historians will have access to the thoughts, behaviours, and activities of everyday people, the sorts of which who are not generally preserved in the record. Military historians will have access to the voices of soldiers, posting from overseas missions and their bases at home. And political historians will have a significant opportunity to see how people engaged with politicians and the political sphere, during both elections and between them. The scale boggles. Modern social movements, from the Canadian #IdleNoMore protest focusing on the situation of First Nations peoples to the global #Occupy movement that grew out of New York City, leave the sorts of records that would rarely, if ever, have been kept by previous generations. During the #IdleNoMore protest, for example, twitter witnessed an astounding 55,334 tweets on 11 January 2013. If we were to take the median length of a tweet (60 characters), the average length of a word (5 characters plus a space), and think about 300 words per page, we're looking at over 1,800 pages. This for a single day of a single social movement in the relatively small country of Canada.

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## References

* Ainsworth, Scott G.; Ahmed AlSum; Hany SalahEldeen; Michele C. Weigle; and Michael L. Nelson. _How Much of the Web Is Archived?_ arXiv:1212.6177 [cs], December 26, 2012. [http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.6177](http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.6177)
* Bady, A., _#NotAllPublic, Heartburn, Twitter_, 10 June 2014, [http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/notallpublic-heartburn-twitter/](http://thenewinquiry.com/blogs/zunguzungu/notallpublic-heartburn-twitter/), last accessed 16 June 2015
* Driscoll, K. and S. Walker, _Big Data, Big Questions| Working Within a Black Box: Transparency in the Collection and Production of Big Twitter Data_, International Journal of Communication, vol. 8, p. 20, Jun. 2014.
* Gleick, James, _The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood_, 2012.
* IBM Research. “What is Big Data?” [http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/what-is-big-data.html/](http://www-01.ibm.com/software/data/bigdata/what-is-big-data.html/), 2016.
* Kim, Dorothy and Eunsong Kim, _The #TwitterEthics Manifesto,_ 7 April 2014, [https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-twitterethics-manifesto](https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-twitterethics-manifesto).
* O'Neil, Lauren, _University's 'Black Twitter' study generates controversy_, 4 September 2014, [http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2014/09/universitys-black-twitter-study-generates-controversy.html](http://www.cbc.ca/newsblogs/yourcommunity/2014/09/universitys-black-twitter-study-generates-controversy.html).
* Ruest, Nick, '#elxn42 tweets', [http://hdl.handle.net/10864/11270](http://hdl.handle.net/10864/11270) V2 [Version], 2015.
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