Twitter is a digital salon, a global party line, offering a window to real-time information and sentiment on a tremendous scale. There have been many compelling projects to analyze and monitor twitter activity as well as automate communication for entertainment, journalism, and scholarship.

Let’s meet to discuss possibilities for analyzing, reporting, or remixing content from Twitter.

Examples:

@congressedits is a twitter bot that was created to monitor and report changes to Wikipedia entries made from IP addresses assigned to the United States Congress. The script is open source and has been used by others to monitor changes made by other organizations, many civic and government. – inkdroid.org/journal/2014/07/10/why-congressedits/

The New Yorker has an interesting article from 2013 about Twitter bots and their use, from compelling to crude – www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-rise-of-twitter-bots

Technology can be intimidating.  Usually unnecessarily so.  Is the best way for folks in the digital humanities to get past this to learn to code?  Is this an unreasonable, unnecessary and even counter-productive expectation or an acknowledgement of what it takes to fully engage in technology?  As a coder and a librarian I’ll present both sides of the argument and hope it stimulates lively, maybe even uncomfortable, discussion.