Last April, I started to collect tweets containing the hashtag #twitterstorians1. The idea is to question whether it is possible to capture / understand in almost real time historiographies in the making. As you all know, this hashtag was created by Katrina Gulliver.

After three months, I attempted to do a first text analysis of this #twitterstorians corpus – but it was still too tiny to be analysed. A few days ago, I attempted again to analyse it and it seemed to work, this time.

I am using a software, iramuteq, developped by Pierre Ratinaud, assistant professor in Toulouse (South-Eastern France). Iramuteq is an interface to the statistical software R. Iramuteq allow to analyse raw texts, that are stored within a corpus that is very slightly encoded (FR). By the way, iramuteq is developped in several languages (including english) and can perform text analysis in French, English, German and more. So download it and try it!

Corpus description

The corpus was divided into 24613 texts and text units (between 13 and 14 words in each text units in average – in this case, as it is a corpus made of tweets, texts and text units are the same), with 33582 occurences and 19870 forms (the corpus is lemmatised). There are 2.39% of HAPAX (forms appearing only once) and they form around 40% of the occurrences.

The analyses

Similitude

Classification

The six classes

1	2	3	4	5	6
write	conference	amrev	oupacademic	military	irishhistory
new	call	cw150	prof	society	onthisday
what	journal	civilwar	associate	smh_historians	irelandhistory
post	paper	worldhistory	pageant	announcement	birth
blog	annual	lizcovart	bursary	milhist	shkenna
archive	global	allthingsliberty	markfreeman1974	academic	born
usih	programme	klinecj	ahrc	membership	dublin
know	online	boston1775	glasgow	airminded	irish
great	submit	gettysburg	fund	official	die
think	case	todayinhistory	close	militaryhistory	invincibles
teach	due	morgan	ahrcpress	history	1916rising
love	workshop	edmund	tudor	facebook	macneill
like	program	paul	uniofnottingham	hwar	poet
research	study	revolution	jan	digest	ireland
book	proposal	understand	ra	kansas	patrick
need	update	revolutionary	studentship	jun	death
find	symposium	earlyamhist	cfp	apr	valera
good	cfp	lincoln	skill	81st	limerick
talk	release	revwar	economichistory	ddln	found
look	imperial	act	succession	westpoint_usma	leader
podcast	georgian	gwbooks	lecturer	check	execution
life	carnival	myhnn	grow	mtg	plunkett
work	oct	boston	deptford	mo	mp
student	frus	egypt	tmrw	page	eoin
acwri	september	liverpool	kcl	canberra	brenmalone
social	host	confederate	reveal	date	james
back	pleasure	apostlepaul	oso	phdchat	parnell
will	paris	maier	emmalautman	keep	hunger
survey	historycarnival	suffragette	smoke	sem	casement
read	follow	revreborn	historylabplus	link	cork
thought	deadline	pauline	recordkeeping	ann	thomas
tip	europe	loyalist	angelabartie	list	execute
robgreeneii	nomination	animate	form	opportunity	belfast
past	visit	abraham	submission	crown	kilmainham
source	collection	economics	reconstruct	resource	series
library	application	landscape	wcomehs	sep	rise
public	reminder	megankatenelson	phd	war	league
question	relevant	myth	imcl	unsw	stewart
hashtag	report	nation	suit	fellowship	archbishop
term	miss	ferguson	fresher	prefer	hang
ff	oxford	womenshistory	age	late	rossa
website	registration	spirit	britac_news	net	gaol
thing	join	civil	empire	job	treaty
thesis	the_oah	gettysburg150	londoners	jul	wynns
man	international	address	ryrie	brian	centenary
name	shafrconference	paint	alec	rape	unite
19thc	sexuality	french	durham_uni	nov	pearse
mean	sept	force	project	interest	ruth
highered	dance	soldier	university	city	roscommon

Dendogram of the six classes

Conclusions: academic communication and Public History

The #twitterstorians hashtag is firstly a communication channel, as the classification analysis is showing (classes 1 & 2: books, articles, blogs for class 1 and CFPs, conferences for class 2) and also the similitude one. But looking at the four other classes, you remark that there are some domains that are more dynamic: Irish history, Military history, US history. In the details, notably in the similitude graph, you observe that those tweets are first concerning Public History (see the “onthisday” linked to “irishhistory” for instance). The similitude graph shows also some hashtags that are worth a harvest: #envhist, for instance.

1. I also collect #digitalhumanities, #digitalhistory and #dighist [↩]