Reconstruction Vol. 16, No. 1
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Archiving Academic Tweets: The Digital Backchannel as an Ephemeral Archive / Ashley Hall
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.
Keywords: Museums & Archives, Rhetoric, Science & Technology
<1> Academic conferences are venues where scholars test out new ideas, share research, learn about the work of peers, and network with colleagues. This constellation of discursive, oral, and embodied rhetorics is fundamental to how knowledge, within the academy, is produced. Despite the importance of these activities and the central role they play in the production of knowledge, academic conference discourse remains relatively understudied [1]. As John Swales notes, the complexities of gathering, preserving, archiving, and analyzing such a large and diverse corpus of spoken and written data have impeded the serious study of academic conference discourse except for, of course, the published proceedings of conference papers, which are readily accessible to scholars who may wish to study them[2].
<2> Meanwhile, regular wireless Internet access at academic conferences, coupled with the proliferation of Internet-connected "smart" devices such as tablets and phones, have given rise to an emergent form of participating in the knowledge-constructing activities of academic conferences: the digital backchannel [3]. Text messaging (SMS), Internet relay chat (IRC), live blogging, and microblogging are all various ways of participating in the digital backchannel of an academic conference.
<3> These new ways of engaging in the discursive practices related to academic conferences are important for several reasons. Some have celebrated these backchannel activities lauding their democratic and participatory features, pointing to new possibilities for collaboration and conversation; for example, Letierce et al. argue that Twitter holds the potential to "help the erosion of boundaries between researchers and a broader audience" [4]. Ebner's findings illustrate some of these potentials; his research shows that scholars who attended the keynote presentation of the ED-MEDIA 2008 conference participated in the Twitter backchannel by sharing links, engaging in conversation about the keynote presentation, and posting reactions to the presentation—all via Twitter.
<4> Others have lauded the ways in which Twitter has expanded the range and reach of scholarly conversation. For example, in 2013, Quinn Warnick, an assistant professor of digital rhetoric at Virginia Tech, celebrated with his colleagues when the hashtag #cwcon started "trending" in the United States during the annual Computers and Writing Conference. It is also becoming a common practice among graduate students to follow the Twitter streams for academic conferences they are unable to physically attend. Some conference attendees, however, have expressed skepticism and concern, suggesting that an audience full of individuals looking at their phones or tablets may be distracting to the presenter, who is no longer receiving nonverbal cues from audience members because they are looking down at screens instead of at the front where the speaker typically stands to present. Despite this ongoing debate about when and how audience members should post online about conference presentations, digital backchannel technologies can, as Jacobs and McFarlane note, "'wire' the audience, connecting them to the Internet and each other continuously, enabling them to investigate a speaker's claims, and interact with each other, and with others worldwide as they listen to the presentations" [5].
<5> Whether or not digital backchannels are explicitly acknowledged or promoted by conference organizers, conference attendees are creating and participating in conversations about the conference activities using digital backchannel technologies. Furthermore, as Jacobs and McFarlane suggest, the digital backchannel "can capture the contributions of all conference members and form a record that goes beyond the contribution of the named presenters" [6]. Because these backchannel conversations often take place on public digital fora, they present a new opportunity for the systematic investigation of informal conference discourse in emerging genres.
The Rhetorical Exigence: Why Study the Digital Backchannel?
<6> On March 14, 2013 Merideth Garcia, a graduate student in rhetoric and composition at the University of Michigan, blogged that she was unable to attend the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCCs) but instead-to stay connected to the scholarly conversation transpiring at the event-she "stalked the conference on twitter" [7]. Garcia explains how she did so, including a detailed description of the process she (and others) followed while trying to figure out the "official" conference hashtag. In documenting her experience, Garcia included screen shots of actual tweets and explained that first she and others had to search for and locate the "right" hashtag for the conference. Once she figured out that the conference organizers were promoting #4C13 as the official hashtag, Garcia was able to participate in the backchannel conversation from a distance; she was able to discover, listen to, and even participate in the discussion about panels and presentations happening at the conference by using Twitter.
<7> A year before Garcia participated in the CCCCs conference conversation remotely via Twitter, Roopika Risam (also a graduate student at the time) described a similar experience. In a post on Emory University's Academic Exchange blog, Risam writes that she "enjoyed reading about talks at four conferences she was unable to attend by following the Twitter hashtags used by tweeting attendees" [8]. Garcia's and Risam's descriptions of using Twitter to follow the events, activities, and conversations demonstrate how an academic conference's digital backchannel can be useful not only to those who are present at the conference, but also to those who are not able to physically attend and participate in the face-to-face experience. And, both of these cases point to one possible way that graduate students (who are often limited in the number of conferences they can attend due to circumstances such as financial constraints or limited flexibility in teaching schedules) might be able to leverage Twitter to their advantage to observe or even participate in the conference conversation. Additionally, as Risam notes, "with many professors and graduate students using the platform to share information and their research, Twitter has begun to transform the academy, raising questions about how we might engage with public scholarship to enlarge spaces of scholarly communication"[9]. The broader audience theorized by Letierce et al. could certainly include graduate students who are eager to stay abreast of current research in their field but who may not be able to physically attend a particular conference due to limited funding or other constraints on their resources. Following along and even participating in the digital backchannel of a conference via Twitter from a distance certainly does not replace the richness or fullness of attending an academic conference in person nor does it address the complex labor and financial challenges inherent to the position of graduate students within the academy but it is one way for those who would otherwise be disconnected from the conference conversation to connect, and perhaps even to contribute (at least partially and informally) to the conference discourse.
<8> Alexis Lothian, an assistant professor of women's studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, sheds light on another important aspect of live tweeting an academic conference, offering insight from the perspective of a (tweet) writer. Lothian, who has been contributing to the Twitter backchannel at academic conferences since the 2010 Digital Media and Learning conference, explains that she "[loves] swimming through the datastream, documenting comments, thoughts and interactions as they occur" [10]. Lothian portrays the writing process involved in live tweeting during an academic conference, saying "I find more and more that there is a particular zone of attention it is possible to enter, where I can synthesize and transmit as I hear and [I] engage far more immensely with what's being said than I ever would otherwise" [11]. Thus, for Lothian at least, composing thoughts in bursts of a hundred and forty characters or less and sharing them on Twitter is not merely something that benefits those who read and consume the tweets, but is also a part of an intellectual meaning-making process for her as a writer.
<9> Established professors are not the only ones participating in the writing processes and information-sharing practices involved in composing tweets during academic conferences. Katy Meyers, a graduate student in anthropology at Michigan State University, writes in her GradHacker column for Inside Higher Ed that she often tweets during academic conferences. Meyers explains that doing so has, in her experience, led to "great discussions with people who weren't able to attend and allowed for continuing engagement between the participants" [12]. Kristina DeVoe of Temple University Libraries summarizes both sides of the experience when she writes,
Participating in conferences online via Twitter has growing appeal for conference enthusiasts, regardless of whether they are physically attending. For those who are unable to attend in-person, tweets after the conference help give a sense of 'being there' while still catching the salient points of presentation talks. For on-site participants, contributing and commenting on tweets aids in creating rich, multi-threaded conversations that span the length of the conference and beyond [13].
These accounts from Garcia, Risam, Lothian, Meyers, and DeVoe are noteworthy—not because they are unique, but because they illustrate an important set of emerging discursive and rhetorical practices, ones that should be captured, preserved, and archived.
<10> While both Twitter and backchannel discourse have been previously studied, analyzed, and theorized, there has not yet been an investigation of how live tweeting an academic conference in a backchannel conversation creates an ephemeral digital archive. I argue that we should preserve and archive conference Twitterstreams, which would make these backchannel tweets available for subsequent access and study, thereby making the ephemeral archive a more permanent one. After reviewing the relevant literature on how Twitter is used during academic conferences, I will turn to a discussion of archival efforts focused on preserving tweets and discuss a range of the different methods and tools scholars have used to study backchannel tweets at academic conferences. I will then present a method for archiving backchannel Twitterstreams created during academic conferences using freely available open-source Drupal software and the Tweet Feed contributed module. I argue that this proposed process (or a similar one) should be used in systematic and concerted ways to preserve and build digital archives of the Twitter backchannels for academic conferences; these archives would be highly useful for research in a wide range of disciplines, and would advance our ability to better understand how knowledge is produced, both formally and informally, in a particular rhetorical situation—the conference—that has heretofore been extremely difficult to study.
Twitter as an Object of Scholarly Inquiry
<11> Bodong Chen, an educational researcher who studies learning technologies, has characterized Twitter as "among the most influential Web 2.0 services" [14]. Twitter, a relative newcomer to the social media landscape, has existed only since 2006. While it is not the only microblogging platform, it is the most widely used by both academics and the general public [15]. According to the Pew Research Center's most recently reported statistics, although Facebook remains the most frequently used social media site among the general public, Twitter usage continues to grow year after year and in 2015 is used by nearly a quarter of online adults[AH1]. These metrics indicate that daily Twitter usage is steadily increasing, and as usage increases, so does its significance as an object of scholarly inquiry.
<12> Within a year of Twitter's creation, scholars were already conducting research on the platform. As early as September 2007, Edward Mischaud submitted a dissertation titled "Twitter: Expressions of the Whole Self" to the Department of Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and Politics for his MSc degree [16]. A month earlier, in August 2007, Akshay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finn, and Belle Tseng presented "Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities" at the WEBKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop, representing one of the earliest research studies focused on the Twitter platform. As Java et al. note in their introduction, scholars at the time felt that "with the recent popularity of Twitter and similar microblogging systems, it is important to understand why and how people use these tools" [17]. To date, this study, which was included in the published proceedings of the 2008 Joint 9th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop, has been downloaded 20,958 times and cited 372 times [18], confirming both an initially high level of interest in Twitter among scholars and also ongoing interest.
<13> Java et al.'s study played an important role in establishing a foundation for subsequent scholars to build upon as the initial scholarly interest expanded, branched out, and started to focus on more disciplinary-specific research questions. Almost immediately, researchers such as Reinhardt et al. began to study whether and how Twitter might be used in the production and dissemination of knowledge among groups of people with shared interests, such as communities of learners or scholars in a particular field [19]. Courtenay Honeycutt and Susan Herring published a study on Twitter conversations and collaborations that focused on the @ sign's use as a rhetorically significant marker of addressivity; Bernard Jansen and his colleagues theorized the discourse produced on Twitter as a form of "electronic word of mouth" [20]. Around the same time, Martin Ebner drew from Java et al.'s work on Twitter along with his own previous research on microblogging (e.g. Ebner and Schiefner; Ebner and Maurer) to document and theorize one of the earliest times (and possibly the first time) that Twitter was used during an academic conference then studied in a serious way [21].
<14> Although Ebner, an internationally renowned e-learning scholar, had previously studied a different microblogging platform (Jaiku), he decided to use Twitter when he designed an experiment to answer his research question "Can microblogging enhance a live event?" He explains his motivation for doing so, saying "Twitter was chosen because it is the most used and well-known worldwide" [22]. The results of Ebner's experiment, which were published as a case study of live tweeting during a conference keynote presentation, paved the way for future research on the uses of Twitter by communities of scholars, especially during academic conferences. These studies include those conducted by Reinhardt et al, Letierce et al., Ross et al., Costa et al., and Chen.
<15> Studying Twitter, however, is more difficult than it might at first appear and is becoming ever more challenging as new technological hurdles emerge. The sheer volume of information being produced and shared on Twitter is enormous, and thus can present a problem for scholars studying tweets. Twitter proudly boasts that their users create approximately half a billion tweets are created by their users each and every day [23]. In practical everyday terms, this flood of information can be a challenge for people—scholars or not—to navigate, as UMich graduate student Merideth Garcia's difficulty in identifying the CCCC hashtag (described above) shows. For researchers, the volume of tweets generated on a daily basis can be viewed as simultaneously a treasure trove and a quandary.
<16> While there is unquestionably interest in and value to be gained from scholarship focused on Twitter, there are a range of different methods and tools that can be used to answer research questions. Some scholars have used survey methods to understand when, how, and why people use Twitter, including at academic conferences [24], while other scholars have used digital tools and data mining methods to collect and analyze datasets of tweets [25] When, in the early days of Twitter, Java et al. conducted their landmark research, they used one of Twitter's developer APIs to create a dataset of 1,348,543 tweets created by 76,177 distinct users over a two-month period from April 01, 2007 to May 30, 2007 [26]. Their results indicated that people were using Twitter for four main purposes: (1) daily chatter, (2) conversations, (3) sharing information and/or URLs, and (4) reporting the news [27]. This robust study of Twitter discourse helped answer questions about why and how people were using Twitter. However, an attempt to replicate this study using the same method today would—if it were possible to do so—generate a dataset of approximately thirty billion tweets (factoring in Twitter's estimate of five hundred million daily tweets, generated daily collected over a sixty-day period). Furthermore, new business policies established by Twitter limit the amount of data that users can access via the APIs. Twitter's Streaming API, which, according to Gaffney and Puschmann, "is likely the most widely used data source for Twitter research" (56), has three levels of access, which they call spritzer (1%), garden hose (10%), and firehose (100%) [28]. Gaffney and Puschmann explain that "by default, any regular user account on Twitter is granted spritzer access to the system," with higher levels reserved for "users with defensible and compelling reasons for increased access" or users who have "a business relationship" with Twitter [29]. Similar limitations apply to Twitter's REST API and Search API. Thus both volume and technical restrictions present challenges to individual researchers. That is not to say, however, that large-scale efforts to capture and archive tweets are unwarranted; in fact, Twitter has already partnered with the Library of Congress to do just that.
The Library of Congress Twitter Archives
<17> In April of 2010, the Library of Congress reached an agreement with Twitter to acquire a digital archive of approximately 170 billion tweets posted between 2006, when the microblogging company was founded, and 2010, when the agreement was signed. In addition, the agreement established a process for the ongoing archiving of the approximately half a billion new tweets created daily [30].
<18> According to Gayle Osterberg, Director of Communications for the Library of Congress, the Twitter archive is "a new kind of collection for the Library of Congress but an important one to its mission" [31]. In addition to serving as the official research facility for Congress, the Library's mission is also to "further the progress of knowledge and creativity for the benefit of the American people" [32]. The Twitter archive will align with and support this aim of the Library, for, as Osterberg notes, "as society turns to social media as a primary method of communication and creative expression, social media is supplementing, and in some cases supplanting, letters, journals, serial publications and other sources routinely collected by research libraries" [33]. While some people may discount tweets as mere idle chatter, it is clear that the Library of Congress sees the potential value this archive holds, especially for scholars.
<19> As of January 2013, the Library had already received over four hundred inquiries from researchers wishing to use the Twitter archive for research [34]. To date, however, the Library has been unable to grant researchers access to the Twitter archive due to technical limitations [35]. A white paper published by the Library of Congress explains that "executing a single search of just the 2006-2010 archive on the Library's systems could take 24 hours," acknowledging that "this is an inadequate situation in which to begin offering access to researchers, as it so severely limits the number of possible searches" [36]. Thus, while the official Twitter archive maintained by the Library of Congress is in place and is growing day by day, the archive's usefulness for researchers is currently negligible. A historical record of the tweets generated about academic conferences is surely present in the Library of Congress archive, yet without access to the archive or the ability to efficiently search and extract data, scholars who want to study conference tweets must use other tools and methods. Instead of consulting an already existing archive, scholars must create one.
Capturing, Preserving, and Archiving Tweets
<20> Merideth Garcia's blog post about virtually observing the 2013 CCCCs gathering offers an example of a small independent archive of the Twitter backchannel conversations of scholars at that conference meeting. But my designation of Garcia's screenshots of tweets as an archive is fraught. Some formally trained archivists might object to my use of the term to describe Garcia's collection and use of tweets. For example, archivist Kate Theimer explains that, while "archivists have become accustomed to the adoption of [the term] 'archives' by information technologists as well as the general public to refer to things which we archivists would not call archives," she is still "struck with how often [digital humanities scholars] refer to the 'archives' they or their colleagues create" [37]. Garcia captured (as screenshots), preserved (as digital files), and integrated (as what we might call a "source") a number of tweets in her blog post. But to call this activity archiving, or the collection of tweets an archive, does not necessarily meet the all aspects of the formal definition endorsed by the Society of American Archivists—the definition that Theimer relies upon. While Theimer is primarily concerned with what she views as the problematic use of the term digital archive to refer to "online groupings of digital copies of non-digital original materials," her argument also places a fair amount of emphasis on issues of selection. She repeats several times that "archivists do not select," and clarifies this by saying that instead "selection decisions are made at the aggregate level;" instead Theimer would probably prefer that I call Garcia's aggregation "preservation," and her use of tweets a "collection," a term that she asserts "clearly implies materials that have been assembled and intentionally brought together" [38].
<21> We might say that Theimer is critiquing the "archive fever" described by Derrida in what she sees as an overuse of the term archive by digital humanists. And, at the same time, her concern can itself be seen as symptomatic of Derrida's archive fever; she falls victim to the very illness that preoccupies her. Yet, we must also recall that Derrida says that "every archive … is at once institutive and conservative. Revolutionary and traditional" [39]. In this light, we might attempt to rethink the term archive and what might rightfully be called an archive in the spirit of Susan Wells who says that "the archive resists knowledge in a number of ways. It refuses closure" [40]. Following this line of thinking, I argue that it is not only what is contained in the archive, but also the term archive itself that resists closure, resists the confines of what it has been traditionally understood to be or to mean. And in rethinking the notion of an archive and who is authorized to create one, we can—and should—begin to rethink questions of authority. Is the creation of an archive confined only to those with the formal training and title of "archivist"? Must the traditional distinction between one who creates an archive and one who visits and composes from an archive remain?
<22> Blurring these lines, and deliberately conflating these roles, would certainly be in keeping with other trends and movements in digital culture. What media studies scholar Henry Jenkins calls participatory culture, and what legal scholar Lawrence Lessig calls read/write culture, and what techno-rhetorician Daniel Anderson calls a prosumer culture, all describe a cultural movement that is facilitated by digital technologies, and in which the distinctions between producer and consumer (of knowledge, text, media, and so on) are elided. These theories of digital culture can help us understand the basis for Matthew Kirschenbaum's speculation that "today's changes and transitions in the archives profession are brought about not only by the rise of the born-digital but also the popularization and distribution—arguably, the democratization—of various archival functions" [41]. They also support my appeal to rethink what an archive is (or what may be called an archive), and to reimagine who we may accept as doing archival work; for, as Ebner observed, simply participating in the digital backchannel through activities such as link sharing has "an archiving effect" [42]. Furthermore, if we recognize the tweets created as part of the digital backchannel as a legitimate archive of conference discourse, we can also begin to understand the role that these emerging discursive and rhetorical practices might play in transforming (and perhaps democratizing) the knowledge-producing activities of academic conferences.
Emerging Practices and Evolving Definitions
<23> Typically, a conference presentation is a highly structured rhetorical situation in which the roles for speaker and audience are defined in such a way that allows for minimal interaction during the presentation; a formal question and answer period at the conclusion of the session provides a similarly highly structured situation, albeit one with some interactivity between the speaker and audience members. The digitally supported conversation and collaboration that are characteristic of the digital backchannel, however, have the potential to erode, in productive ways, who is authorized to speak or participate during a conference presentation [43]. Some have critiqued the traditional academic conference paradigm arguing that it creates a number of communicative "problems," which include "lack of feedback, nervousness about asking questions … reduction in collaboration and interaction" [44] and "feedback lag, stress for asking questions, and participation decrease" [45]. Likewise, it is suggested by Joseph McCarthy et al. that "opportunities for 'give and take' tend to be unevenly distributed among the conference attendees, depending on one's status in the community, level of participation in the formal conference program, and more subtle issues such as one's native language and level of extroversion" [46]. Educational researchers have noted similar communicative problems in educational settings, especially in large lecture classes [47]. To combat these communication problems, Richard Anderson and his colleagues designed the Classroom Feedback System, which used computer-mediated communication (CMC) to create a digital backchannel that aimed to foster increased participation and conversation between the teacher and students. The work of Anderson et al. has become foundational to scholars theorizing the digital backchannel of academic conferences and also to scholars designing and building digital platforms that facilitate digital backchannels at academic conferences [48].
<24> According to Chen, "tweeting on an academic conference is a relatively new usage" of Twitter [49] . It makes sense then that the tools, methods, and practices of capturing, preserving, and archiving tweets are still in the early stages of development and negotiation. For instance, Garcia comments in her blog post, "It occurs to me that I don't know the citation etiquette here [for using archived tweets]" [50]. She then goes on to ask, "Do I black out people's names? Get their permission? Everybody who tweeted about Cs is (surely) over 18, so at least there's that. Will I have to delete this post later to be safe?" [51]. Clearly the questions Garcia poses and the concerns she expresses illustrate that there is still much left to be settled even if we agree to call her collection of tweets an archive or if we recognize her work as archival. Yet, these questions are far from being the only issues that remain unsettled when it comes to creating and using archives of an academic conference's Twitter backchannel.
<25> One of the most pressing concerns for scholars studying Twitter is how to create and preserve the archive itself. In 2008, when Ebner conducted his case study of how Twitter could be used to enhance a conference presentation, he not only described the audience as playing an active role in the meaning-making process by participating in the digital backchannel; he also found that activities such as link sharing via Twitter were archival in nature, since "all shared resources are still available on the web and can be retrieved at any time" [52]. What Ebner failed to recognize, however, is the ephemeral nature of the Twitter backchannel archive.
<26> Like all digital texts online, what is there one moment may be gone the next. Therefore, scholars studying the digital backchannel of an academic conference should not rely on an assumption that once the stream has been created it will be accessible at a later date. A search for the #edmedia08 hashtag execute today returns forty-six tweets; when Ebner published his case study in 2009, his dataset included fifty-four tweets. Therefore, either some tweets have been deleted or some contributors have made their Twitter accounts private. Twitter's reverse-chronological feed structure, which places the most recent content at the top and pushes older content to the bottom, coupled with what Honeycutt and Herring describe as Twitter's "'noisy' environment," further complicate archival efforts after the fact.
<27> A number of methods and tools can be used to capture, preserve, and archive the digital backchannel of an academic conference. With sufficient technical knowledge, a researcher can create a "Twitter app" that uses the OAuth open protocol to make a secure connection to Twitter's REST API or Streaming API. The REST API would be appropriate for most research inquiries into the Twitter backchannel of academic conferences, because it allows for GET requests that "returns a collection of relevant tweets matching a specified query" [53]. In other words, after authenticating with a valid Consumer Key (API Key), Consumer Secret (API Secret), OAuth Access Token, and OAuth Access Token Secret, a researcher can extract tweets matching a search query—such as the hashtag for a particular conference. Once the call is complete, the results are available in JSON to be inserted into a database. But this method does not, however, guarantee that every tweet will be captured. Twitter's API documentation notes that this method "is not meant to be an exhaustive source of Tweets," and adds that "not all Tweets will be indexed or made available via the search interface" [54]. Still, this method of capturing, preserving, and archiving tweets is more reliable than simply assuming that once something is posted online it will remain readily available at a later date.
<28> Other ways of capturing, preserving, and archiving tweets are also available. Storify is an example of a site commonly used by digital rhetoric scholars to create archives of tweets. While Storify, like other, similar applications, does allow a user to search Twitter's API without the need for coding an interface or programmatically inserting records into a database, and while it does provide an option that is superior to taking screenshots, the resultant Storify archive is far less flexible than one created by accessing the API directly.
<29> Another option—a middle-of-the-road solution—is the open-source Tweet Feed module for the Drupal content management system. Unlike Storify, Tweet Feed requires the researcher to obtain the keys and tokens necessary to authenticate via OAuth, but it removes several technical hurdles by accepting these credentials via a standard Drupal configuration interface. Once properly configured, the Tweet Feed module allows users to query and extract tweets matching the desired query string (e.g. a conference hashtag). The extracted data is programmatically inserted into the standard MySQL database for the Drupal installation. Those data can then easily be queried using Drupal's views interface, or exported for descriptive statistical analysis in applications like SPSS.
<30> While the Drupal approach offers many benefits to scholars who wish to study the Twitter backchannel of one or more academic conferences, it is not, however, without its own limitations. As with all of Twitter's publicly available APIs, there are restrictions placed on the number and frequency of requests that can be made (request times are measured in increments of fifteen minutes; fifteen requests are allowed in each fifteen-minute window). Another limitation is temporal. Data must be queried, extracted, and saved into a database in a relatively timely manner (typically within a few days). For best results, then, a researcher conducting a serious study using Twitter's API should properly configure and test their archival method prior to the actual event.
Conclusion
<31> Less than a decade after its founding, Twitter has assumed an important position in the social media landscape. There is no
doubt that many of the half a billion tweets generated every day are trivial or mundane. But Twitter is also being used in other ways—for communication,
collaboration, problem solving, community building, and knowledge generation. All these ways of using the Twitter platform are, unsurprisingly, being found
in communities of like-minded scholars, especially those with an interest in digital culture and digital technologies. We are thus presented with an
opportunity—one that has thus far been out of our reach: an opportunity to better understand our own community's ways of producing, negotiating, and
sharing knowledge. We can do this by taking seriously the value of the digital backchannel, and by rigorously investigating what we say, how we say it, and
with whom we engage. The time is ripe for digital humanists, and digital rhetoricians in particular, to turn our attention in this direction and begin
archiving and investigating our own discursive practices; let's bring the backchannel forward a bit.
Notes
[1] Eija Ventola, Celia Shalom, and Susan Thompson, The Language of Conferencing (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 361; John Swales, "Review: The Language of Conferencing," Applied Linguistics 24, no. 4 (2003): 549, doi:10.1093/applin/24.4.549; Neal Jacobs and Angela Lane, "Conferences as Learning Communities: Some Early Lessons in Using 'Back-Channel' Technologies at an Academic Conference-Distributed Intelligence or Divided Attention?" Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 21, no. 5 (2005): 317, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2729.2005.00142.x
[2] Swales, "Review," 549.
[3] Jacobs and McFarlane, "Conferences as Learning Communities," 319; Joseph McCarthy and danah m. boyd. "Digital Backchannels in Shared Physical Spaces: Experiences at an Academic Conference," (presentation, CHI 2005, Portland, OR, April 2-7, 2005), doi: 10.1145/1056808.1056986; Bodong Chen, "Is the Backchannel Enabled? Using Twitter at Academic Conferences," (presentation, 2011 Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, LA, April 8-12, 2011), http://www.researchgate.net/.
[4] Julie Letierce, Alexandre Passant, John Breslin, and Stefan Decker, "Understanding How Twitter is Used to Spread Scientific Messages," (presentation, Web Science Conference 2010, Raleigh, NC, April 26-27, 2010), http://journal.webscience.org.
[5] Jacobs and McFarlane, "Conferences as Learning Communities," 319.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Merideth Garcia, "Confessions of a Conference Lurker," MeridethGarcia.com (blog), March 17, 2013, http://meridethgarcia.com/.
[8] Roopika Risam, "Twittergate: Live Tweeting from Academic Conferences," The Academic Exchange (blog), October 6, 2012, http://www.emory.edu/.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Alexis Lothian, "MLA 2011 and #mla11: On Tweeting Conventions," Queer Geek Theory (blog), January 10, 2011, http://www.queergeektheory.org/.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Katy Meyers, "Best Practices for Live-Tweeting," GradHacker (blog), June 2, 2013, https://www.insidehighered.com/.
[13] Kristina DeVoe, "'You'll Never Guess Who I Talked To!': Tweeting at Conferences," The Reference Librarian 51, no. 2 (2010): 167.
[14] Chen, "Is the Backchannel Enabled?"
[15] Martin Ebner, "Introducing Live Microblogging: How Single Presentations Can Be Enhanced By The Mass," Journal of Research in Innovative Teaching 2, no. 1 (2009): 94; Wolfgang Reinhardt, Martin Ebner, Günter Beham, and Cristina Costa, "How People are Using Twitter During Conferences," Creativity and Innovation Competencies on the Web. Proceedings of the 5th EduMedia (2009): 145-156; Maeve Duggan, Nicole B. Ellison, Cliff Lampe, Amanda Lenhart, and Marry Madden, "Social Media Update 2014," Pew Research Center, January 9, 2015, http://www.pewinternet.org/.
[16] Edward Mischaud. "Twitter: Expressions of the Whole Self" (master's dissertation, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2007).
[17] Ashkay Java, Xiaodan Song, Tim Finn, and Belle Tseng, "Why We Twitter: Understanding Microblogging Usage and Communities," (presentation, Joint 9 th WebKDD and 1st SNA-KDD Workshop, San Jose, CA, August 12, 2007.): 57, emphasis in original. WebKDD is a special interest group of the Association for Computing Machinery focused on knowledge discovery, data mining, data science, and analytics.
[18] According to the ACM Digital Library as of July 1, 2015. More current statistics may be available at the time of reading: http://dl.acm.org/.
[19] Letierce, Passant, Breslin, and Decker, "Understanding How Twitter"; Courtenay Honeycutt and Susan C. Herring, "Beyond Microblogging: Conversation and Collaboration via Twitter," (presentation, Forty-Second Hawai'i International Conference on System Sciences, Los Alamitos, CA, January 5-8, 2009), doi: 10.1109/HICSS.2009.89; Reinhardt, Ebner, Beham, and Costa, "How People Are Using."
[20] Bernard J. Jansen, Mimi Zhang, Kate Sobel, and Abdur Chowdury, "Twitter Power: Tweets as Electronic Word of Mouth," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 60, no. 11 (2009): 2169.
[21] Ebner, "Introducing Live Microblogging."
[22] Ibid., 94.
[23] "Twitter Usage/Company Facts," Twitter, last modified March 31, 2015, https://about.twitter.com/company.
[24] Reinhardt, Ebner, Beham, and Costa, "How People Are Using"; Letierce, Passant, Breslin, and Decker, "Understanding How Twitter."
[25] Chen, "Is the Backchannel Enabled?"; Honeycutt and Herring, "Beyond Microblogging"; Jansen, Zhang, Sobel, and Chowdury, "Twitter Power"; Ebner, "Introducing Live Microblogging"; Devin Gaffney and Cornelius Puschmann, "Data Collection on Twitter," in Twitter and Society, ed. Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt, and Cornelius Puschmann (New York: Peter Lang, 2014): 55-67.
[26] With approximately 94,000 users on Twitter at that time, Java et al.'s dataset represented just over 80% of all users.
[27] Java, Song, Finn, and Tseng, "Why We Twitter," 57.
[28] Gaffney and Puschmann, "Data Collection on Twitter," 57.
[29] Ibid.
[30] Gayle Osterberg, "Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress," The Library of Congress Blog (blog), January 4, 2013, http://blogs.loc.gov/.
[31] Ibid.
[32] "About the Library," Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/.
[33] Osterberg, "Update on the Twitter Archive."
[34] Ibid.
[35] This was confirmed on Friday, May 29, 2015 via live chat with a Library of Congress reference desk librarian and by Gayle Osterberg, Director of Communications for the Library of Conference via email on June 1, 2015.
[36] Library of Congress, "Update on the Twitter Archive at the Library of Congress," PDF (The Library of Congress, 2013), http://www.loc.gov/.
[37] Kate Theimer, "Archives in Context and as Context," Journal of Digital Humanities 1, no. 2 (2012), http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/.
[38] Ibid.
[39] Jacques Derrida, "Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression," trans. Eric Prenowitz, Diacritics 25, no. 2 (1995): 12.
[40] Susan Wells, "Claiming the Archive for Rhetoric and Composition," in The Norton Book of Composition Studies, ed. Susan Miller (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2009), 913.
[41] Matthew Kirschenbaum, "The.txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary,"Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/.
[42] Ebner, "Introducing Live Microblogging," 96.
[43] Jacobs and McFarlane, "Conferences as Learning Communities," 319.
[44] Claire Ross, Melissa Terras, Claire Warwick, and Anne Welsh, "Enabled Backchannel: Conference Twitter Use by Digital Humanists," Journal of Documentation 67, no. 2 (2011): 214-37. doi: 10.1108/00220411111109449.
[45] Chen, "Is the Backchannel Enabled?"
[46] Joseph F. McCarthy, David W. McDonald, Suzanne Soroczak, David H. Nguyen, and Al M. Rashid, "Augmenting the Social Space of an Academic Conference," in Proceedings of the 2004 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work 6, no. 3 (2004), doi: 10.1145/1031607.1031615.
[47] Donald A. Bligh, What's the Use of Lectures? (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2000); Richard J. Anderson, R. Anderson, T. Vandegrift, S. Wolfman, and K. Yasuhara, "Promoting Interaction in Large Classes with Computer-Mediated Feedback," in Designing for Change in Networked Learning Environments: Proceedings of the International Conference on Computer Support for Collaborative Learning 2003, ed. Barbara Wasson, Sten Ludvigsen, and Ulrich Hope (Bergen: Springer, 2003), 119-23, doi: 10.1007/978-94-017-0195-2_16.
[48] For example, see Reinhardt, et al.; Harry, Green, and Donath; McCarthy and boyd; McCarthy et al.
[49] Chen, "Is the Backchannel Enabled?"
[50] Garcia, "Confessions of a Conference Lurker."
[51] Ibid.
[52] Ebner, "Introducing Live Microblogging," 96.
[53] "GET search/tweets." Twitter.com. https://dev.twitter.com/rest/reference/get/search/tweets.
[54] Ibid.
[AH1] 
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