Week 11: Searching Twitter

I guess I should start out by saying that I haven't spent a great deal of time on Twitter, but based on the searching I've done I don't see myself using Twitter as a research tool. I went into advanced search and saw that it does have a lot of options. I did searches for British Petroleum, oil spill, and Tony Hayward. I found myself paying more attention to the links that some people provided on their tweets rather than to their personal comments. If I'm doing research I want the facts, and people's tweets are their own thoughts, feelings, and observations.

Twitter's gift of its archive of public messages to the Library of Congress has been greeted with excitement by some historians. The article The Library and Twitter by Matt Raymond states that "Twitter is part of the historical record of communication, news reporting, and social trends...It is a direct record of important events...it is a platform for citizen journalism with many significant events being first reported by eyewitnesses." I can see Twitter being used by future historians and sociologists to look at life during our time.

For myself,I see Twitter mainly as being a social network where people share their thoughts and opinions and also follow what other people have to say. That's fine, but that's not where I'm going to go to do research. While Twitter may be of value to historians, it also contains a tremendous amount of junk.

I looked at some organizations on Twitter, such as the Va State Parks, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the VCCS. The state parks and the museum used Twitter to provide information on upcoming events and exhibitions and classes, and I noticed that the VCCS had a number of tweets on the problems we had with accessing Ebsco recently.