Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

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 t...