Stuff that occurs to me

All of my 'how to' posts are tagged here. The most popular posts are about blocking and private accounts on Twitter, also the science communication jobs list. None of the science or medical information I might post to this blog should be taken as medical advice (I'm not medically trained).

Think of this blog as a sort of nursery for my half-baked ideas hence 'stuff that occurs to me'.

Contact: @JoBrodie Email: jo DOT brodie AT gmail DOT com

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Showing posts with label capturing tweets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label capturing tweets. Show all posts

Wednesday, 23 April 2014

April 2014, finding hashtagged tweets from November 2013 - a case study

Earlier today I spotted (I have a saved search on Twitter for my own blog) that someone (@PH_AdvocateEU) had been trying to uncover old tweets from a conference, using information in an even older blog post of mine which is now ridiculously out of date.

Since I like trying to find old tweets and haven't done it for a while I got in touch and asked if I could use it as a case study, to see what could be found. They agreed and I had a look - not much through usual methods but a 'handsearch' (combing through participants' tweets) looks the most promising, but it is the most labour-intensive unfortunately.

The hashtag in question is #EUCOPDBrx13

All the tweets that I've collected (there are more out there, but fiddly to uncover) are in this Storify:
#EUCOPDBrx13 - a collection of conference tweets

1. Has anyone already done the work for you - not in this case
It's possible that someone else has collected the tweets together and embedded them into a blog post or Storify etc, so search for the tag there first (you can use Google's Blog Search tool http://www.google.co.uk/blogsearch) - I didn't find anything on either site in this particular case though.

Sometimes people add a widget to their website which feeds in hashtagged tweets and stuff can be picked up from them (not in this case though it seems).

Note that there may be paid-for services that do this, but I'm afraid I don't know about them. If you have a server and know what an API is you may be able to call them up from Twitter's servers.



2. Twitter.com - a few
Twitter's own search box is a really good place to start, I've recently been surprised and delighted to find really old tweets on it - note though that I'm using the web browser version, not a smartphone or tablet app.

When you first search anything on Twitter you're shown the 'top tweets', you need to click on 'All' to see what else is available... and then you need to scroll down to the end (and keep scrolling until you're met with a note saying 'Back to top' which is Twitter's way of telling you that all available tweets are loaded).

You can see them here (although as time passes fewer of them will appear presumably) https://twitter.com/search?q=%23EUCOPDBrx13%20&src=typd&f=realtime

Doing this brought up 21 tweets - one was @PH_AdvocateEU telling me which hashtag to look for and seven of them were from 'bots' (automated accounts) reporting that the tag was (at the time of the tweet being sent) trending, which certainly suggests that there should be quite a lot of tweets.

Below was the earliest tweet I could find (it's a picture of the tweet with its address beneath it because embedding tweets doesn't seem to work very well on this blog. Subsequent tweets are embedded and show up as plain text).


https://twitter.com/EPHA_EU/status/406044863554019328

























If you are using Storify or Wordpress.com you don't need to use the Embed Code to add a tweet, just its URL. Here are the URLs of the tweets above. If you hover over the datestamp (or timestamp) of the tweet you can then right click / copy link location to get the URL.

https://twitter.com/EPHA_EU/status/406044863554019328 (this is the one shown as a picture above)
https://twitter.com/EU_ZMK/status/406050172041711616
https://twitter.com/EPHA_EU/status/406050856685953024
https://twitter.com/pelletieramelie/status/406051426520297472
https://twitter.com/EU_COPD/status/406052050867191808
https://twitter.com/EU_ZMK/status/406056203069194240
https://twitter.com/EU_COPD/status/406110427458703360
https://twitter.com/EU_COPD/status/406111225538289664
https://twitter.com/EU_ZMK/status/406305632036597760
https://twitter.com/EFA_Patients/status/406420777429655552
https://twitter.com/EFA_Patients/status/407868926047956992
https://twitter.com/EFA_Patients/status/413333619768557568

I may have missed one or two!


3. Search Google - a couple
An ordinary search on Google can also bring up tweets. Don't forget to investigate cached copies of things - if you see a tiny green arrow to the right of a site's address click on that and choose cache (this is an archived copy of the page).

I found a couple that didn't show up when searching directly on Twitter
https://twitter.com/EFA_Patients/status/405963496632115201
https://twitter.com/EU_COPD/status/406042782110060544


4. Targeted search restricted to names - not much, not tried all!
We know who was tweeting about the conference
@EPHA_EU
@EU_ZMK
@pelletieramelie
@EU_COPD
@EFA_Patients

We know from the content of their tweets who else was there, or participating
@imi_Ju, @karinkadenbach, @IPCRG, @yankeeu, @EU_H2020, @mikegalsworthy, @mikakosinska, @NABedlington, @humedsci

Although it doesn't bring up much in this case it's worth adding these names to the hashtag (one by one alas, this is fairly laborious I'm afraid) to see if you can find any other tweets that they sent or were mentioned in.

To find tweets they sent
from:imi_Ju #EUCOPDBrx13

To find tweets mentioning them
@imi_Ju #EUCOPDBrx13

I'd have to concede that this hasn't been particularly successful in this case though!


4. Manually scroll back to the relevant point of people's timelines - very promising, but hard work
Twitter will let you scroll back 3,200 tweets' worth on anyone's page. If they're very chatty this might not help if you're looking five or six months later of course.

I tried this for @EU_COPD, and found this - they've published fewer than 500 tweets so scrolling through wasn't too onerous. Each of these could be captured in a storify by collecting the URL (where it says 28 Nov, in grey - that's the timestamp that has the unique address for the tweet).


I'm not going to collect all of the URLs but a couple are (the last two in this pic)
https://twitter.com/EU_COPD/status/406043881311318016
https://twitter.com/EU_COPD/status/406043106333966336



5. Instagram and other tools - haven't checked
People take pictures, they tag them - have a look on Instagram for the same tag and see if there's any info there (you can include these in Storify stories I think).




Posted by Jo at 00:17 5 comments
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Wednesday, 29 August 2012

Minipost for Jude @theunitlist "what Storify type tool can handle tweets older than 1 week please?"


This post is about freely available tools - there may well be paid-for tools that will do this job even better, please feel free to share in comments. Epilogger is a free tool which I've not yet had cause to use but it might be worth investigating for this - I think it can do more than other tools.

There are two things to think about here. The first is finding old tweets, the second is capturing them. These are separate but related.

Finding
Storify (and Chirpstory which is a similar tool) can often find tweets that are more than a week old although this will also depend on the number of related tweets. If a popular event has had thousands of hashtagged tweets then these tools will only be able to find tweets from one or two days back.

Topsy.com is a great free tool that can find tweets going back much further in time, however it doesn't let you find them in a nicely ordered way - it's a bit random.

If you know who was participating in a conversation you can scroll through their individual timelines to collect tweets (remember each tweet has its own web page / address / URL that can be added to a Storify story). You can also collect tweets from people's favourites, you might find them embedded in other Storify stories or on people's blogs.

Capturing
Normally, when an event is happening the 'finding and capturing'is more or less the same - you can type in your hashtag and a whole bunch of tweets appear in the results window which you can then add to your story.

You can use all sorts of tools to do different versions of this: Twilert will send you emailed alerts of the results of a Twitter search, GrabChat and SearchHash will pretty much automate the finding and capturing of a bunch of tweets (they do need a little bit of babysitting, in terms of collecting the older tweets before they disappear) and there are a whole load of other free / paid-for tools available.

It helps to be aware that Twitter has changed quite dramatically since 2011 to the point that it seems to be (deliberately) that much harder to find older tweets (we used to have Google Realtime which made things very straightforward for scrolling back 18 months or so).

If you can find the URL of a tweet - on Twitter.com look for the 'details' link which appears when you click on a tweet to expand it, on other services look for the twitter bird icon - the URL's probably hidden within it (basically hover over anything until something twitter URLish appears eg https://twitter.com/theunitlist/status/240755916344020992) then you can add it manually to Storify using the link option. That's the little grey button with a small linked chain on it, to the right of the other buttons in the picture here.

Basically after one week you can find tweets with one tool and capture them with another, but the closer you are to when the tweets were posted the easier it is to use one tool for everything.


Further reading - all cited in the post above though.

Monday, 30 May 2011
A list of tools for finding or capturing tweets - this is a long, detailed post looking at a range of tools (some no longer available but I have been a bit 'completist' about the whole thing) for finding, trapping, displaying (eg on a screen behind a speaker, or in a foyer at an event).

Wednesday, 30 May 2012
Storify has added an 'add all tweets' button - hooray - a very short post with a picture to show where to find this useful (to me) newly added improvement.


Thursday, 19 July 2012
Using free tools to capture a handful of tweets or a larger bunch - medium-length post highlighting some of my favourite tools and how I use them. I've not added Epilogger yet but it should really go here I think.
Posted by Jo at 13:30 0 comments
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