The Case Against Spreadsheets https://vimeo.com/526218014 When is a Tweet not a Tweet? My answer: “When it appears in a spreadsheet, or is deleted, or the account has been suspended.” Though the video title sounds polemical, half of the argument strongly supports doing certain parts of Twitter research using spreadsheets. Indeed, Twitter is actively encouraging and training academic researchers to transform raw JSON into CSV files for research purposes. Though I find it counterintuitive to mechanically separate the data from the platform that gives it vitality beyond the moment of the Tweet, I do it all the time with Twitter metadata for a variety of research and model building purposes. However, it is the interactional, evolving, multimodal media content, and distinctive, color-rich look and feel that makes Twitter a quintessential early 21st century social media platform. No spreadsheet can capture that. The case against spreadsheets is rooted in a desire for reliable and authentic interpretation practices for digital artifacts. Tweets do not live and cannot make meaning in spreadsheets. Many researchers wait weeks, months, or years to find the time to look at the data closely. After the collection process stops, Tweets often get deleted. Accounts are suspended or deleted. Though a sophisticated (usually well-funded) research team might have a system and method for compliance checking deletions and suspensions at scale, there is no practical way to check and recheck the 10 million Tweets per month academics can now get under Twitter’s new sponsored quotas. Studying Tweet content in spreadsheets is like studying polar bears in a zoo to explain their fate on the melting ice caps. Many things are fundamentally different at the zoo. Inductive and qualitative methods require seeing Tweets in the native display. The same is true for medium to large scale content analysis, where machine-learning training models informed by features intrinsic in the Twitter display are often more robust than those trained on observations that are text-based only. I have heard the story repeatedly of researchers clicking from spreadsheets to Twitter and back to the spreadsheet to record their observation. This common practice is a lot of work on the mouse. Anyone who has done it at any scale has probably felt the carpal tunnel kick in as it requires a minimum of 4-5 clicks, perhaps more depending on labeling variations. In the video, I describe findings accumulated over ten years of studying and coding Tweets using the Twitter display, obscuring deleted and suspended content in real time, and avoiding whenever possible the computer mouse. Dr. Stuart ShulmanU.S. Soccer Federation C-Licensed Coach