Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

A prompt from Twitter indicating no search results As part of a research experiment, I had the need to find URLs embedded in tweets from Twitter's web  search service . Most of the URLs where much older than 7 days, so using the Twitter search API was not an option since the search is performed on a sample of tweets published in the past 7 days, so I used the web search service.  I began the experiment by pasting URLs from tweets into the search box on twitter.com: Searching Twitter for a URL by pasting the URL into the search box I noticed I was able to find some URLs embedded in tweets, but this was not always the case. Based on my observations, finding the URLs was not correlated with the age of the tweet. I discussed this observation with Ed Summers and he recommended adding a "url:" prefix to the URL before searching. For example, if the search URL is:        "http://www.cnn.com",  he recommended searching for       " url: http://

A Portion of a Tweet Conversation about the Ebola Virus We conducted another study in the same spirit as the first , as part of our research ( funded by IMLS ) to build collections for stories or events. This time we sought to understand how to extract not just a single tweet, but the conversation of which the tweet belongs to. We explored how the visibility of tweets in a conversation graph changes based on the tweet selected. A need for archiving tweet conversations Archiving tweets usually involves collecting tweets associated with a given hashtag. Even though this provides a "clean" way of collecting tweets about the event associated with the hashtag, something important is often missed - conversations. Not all tweets about a particular topic will have the given hashtag,  including portions of a threaded conversation, even if the initial tweet contained the hashtag. This is unfortunate because conversations may provide contextual information about tweet