Document Type
Article
Abstract
While both Twitter and backchannel discourse have been previously studied, analyzed, and theorized, there has not yet been an investigation of how live tweeting during an academic conference creates a backchannel conversation that is an ephemeral digital archive. Recognizing the importance of the backchannel conversation taking place among scholars via Twitter during academic conferences, this essay fills a gap in the existing research by arguing that we should preserve and archive conference Twitterstreams; doing so, I maintain, would make backchannel tweets available for subsequent access and study, thereby addressing the inherent ephemerality of the digital Twitterstream. To this end, I first review the relevant literature on how Twitter is used, especially during academic conferences. I then discuss archival efforts focused on preserving tweets and survey a range of different methods and tools scholars have used to study backchannel tweets at academic conferences, noting some significant limitations. Finally, I present a method for using open-source software to archive backchannel Twitterstreams created during academic conferences, arguing that this, or a similar process, should be used in systematic and concerted ways to preserve and build digital archives that would be of interest to and useful for the research efforts of scholars from a wide range of disciplines.
Repository Citation
Hall, Ashley. "Archiving Academic Tweets: The Digital Backchannel as an Ephemeral Archive." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 16, no. 1, 2016, pp. 1–17. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol16/iss1/5