In background reading on the importance of Twitter I came across many articles articulating the value of Twitter for historical research. Shown best by the decision of the US Library of Congress to archive "the collected works of Twitter" stating that "tweets are becoming part of history.”
As mentioned in my previous blog on Twitter most tweets are rather banal, relate to only few individuals and probably have little or no use to any historian.
As a student of diplomatic history I am all to aware that I often ignore the importance of historical resources simply because they do not relate to my notion of a valuable sources. Historical studies which look a the wider society, role of popular culture etc. will potentially see huge benefit in the recording of tweets.
Why are tweets of historical value?
Future studies looking at attitudes towards Sarah Palin during the 2008 US Presidential election may find some benefit in looking through tweets made during her vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden, by then perhaps more efficient methods of analysing huge quantities of data will have emerged allowing for trends to be spotted.
Because tweets are short (a maximum of 140 characters), time stamped and made by so many individuals they are perfect for meta data analysis (if that is not already a term it ought to be...) which is so useful to many historians.
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