Dear Air-L, I thought I should follow up with a small but perhaps not so insignificant update on my query to the list from January (see below) where I outlined my difficulties in accessing 'historical' Twitter data, specifically a simple search of all tweets using a specific hashtag over around a two year period. Without getting too prematurely excited, it does seem that Twitter has listened to complaints that this rather basic search functionality should be provided to general users, not just big data analysis companies. Today when I searched for a specific hashtag in the ‘discover’ tab, I noticed that a user can indeed now go back (apparently) indefinitely and read all tweets using a particular hashtag. Very best, Scott On Mon, Jan 28, 2013 at 10:22 AM, Scott Rodgers <rodgers_scott at hotmail.com>wrote:
Hello all,
Apologies if I am about to jump in with a question discussed previously
(if so, I am happy to look through the archives) but I have been spending a
lot of time trying get a sense of how one can access 'historical' Twitter
data. A collaborator and I have a fairly small-scale project, for which
we'd like to look back about 2 years at maybe 1-3 specific hashtags all
related to a local neighbourhood campaign. From what I have garnered from a
lot of looking around, the only way to get at historical data is by
purchasing services from third parties with access to the Twitter fire
hose. The problem there is that such companies only seem to offer much more
extensive services than we need - we do not need, for instance, full-scale
quantitative analytics of tweet data, mood, and the like. We simply want to
generate a list of tweets using a certain hashtag over a certain period,
for the purposes of qualitative analysis (it would be linked with
interviews and other secondary information)
.
Any help or pointers would be much appreciated.
Very best,
Scott Rodgers
www.publiclysited.com