Hi Jacob, I am sorry to hear about DMI-TCAT needing to be turned off. But I certainly appreciate the costs of keeping a service like this online. I wonder if it might be feasible to generate tweet ID datasets for the various collections and add them to the Documenting the Now Catalog [1]? The tweet IDs could then be "hydrated" by people who want to use the data, using tools such as the Hydrator [2] or twarc [3]. If this sounds like it might be appropriate and you needed some help I would be willing to lend a hand, since I work on the Documenting the Now project. Sincerely, Ed Summers [1] https://catalog.docnow.io [2] https://github.com/docnow/hydrator [3] https://github.com/docnow/twarc On May 30, 2020 2:28 PM, Jacob Groshek <jgroshek@gmail.com> wrote: Dear Colleagues and Friends, I hope this message finds everyone doing well and managing through this difficult time. I am posting to this list because, after about 7+ years, I am decommissioning a Digital Methods Initiative Twitter Collection and Analysis Toolkit (DMI-TCAT) installation that I oversee. More details on this system, developed by Erik Borra and Bernhard Rieder, are available on github here https://github.com/digitalmethodsinitiative/dmi-tcat While this is an open source platform that was generously made freely available by the developers (sincere and deep thanks to Erik and Bernhard), there can be costs involved with hosting and storage of the system and data. So while there are a variety of reasons for my decision, including a finite amount of research funds that I can dedicate each year, I am truly saddened to be pulling the plug especially because I am fully aware of the value this system carries and its important as a resource for academic research. To cut to the chase, it is roughly $370 per month to host and store this TCAT on Amazon Web Services (AWS), and right now, this TCAT install is at about 70% elastic capacity with more than *560 million tweets* collected over the last few years, on a wide variety of topics, many that relate to political and health communication. If anyone is interested to take over this system, or if there are questions out there, please reach out to me off list and I'm happy to discuss. If there are no takers, this data will no longer be maintained by me after June 30, and repositories of literally hundreds of millions of tweets on COVID-19 and other topics will be lost to the ether. Sorry for the long-ish message and thanks for your consideration. Best regards, Jacob -- Dr. Jacob Groshek Ross Beach Chair in Emerging Media Research and Associate Professor Kansas State University jacobgroshek.com | @jacobgroshek <https://twitter.com/jacobgroshek> | google scholar <https://scholar.google.nl/citations?user=G1XXhccAAAAJ&hl=en> Honorary Associate Professor, Roskilde University <https://ruc.dk/en/department-communication-and-arts> Associate Director, CMCS @ <https://sites.bu.edu/cmcs/> Boston U <https://sites.bu.edu/cmcs/> | Founding Editor, *JoCTEC <http://www.joctec.org/>* Previously: Erasmus U <https://www.eur.nl/en/eshcc/research/ermecc/people/research-fellows > | NeSCoR <http://nescor.socsci.uva.nl/> | Boston Civic Media <http://bostoncivic.media/> | IAST <http://www.iast.fr/> +1-857-615-4709 _______________________________________________ The Air-L@listserv.aoir.org mailing list is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at: http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org Join the Association of Internet Researchers: http://www.aoir.org/