Analyzing history-related posts in twitter
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Analyzing history-related posts in twitter Yasunobu Sumikawa1 · Adam Jatowt2 Received: 30 May 2019 / Revised: 17 August 2020 / Accepted: 23 September 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Microblogging platforms such as Twitter have been increasingly used nowadays to share information between users. They are also convenient means for propagating content related to history. Hence, from the research viewpoint they can offer opportunities to analyze the way in which users refer to the past, and how as well when such references appear and what purposes they serve. Such study could allow to quantify the interest degree and the mechanisms behind content dissemination. We report the results of a large scale exploratory analysis of history-oriented posts in microblogs based on a 28-month-long snapshot of Twitter data. The results can increase our understanding of the characteristics of history-focused content sharing in Twitter. They can also be used for guiding the design of content recommendation systems as well as time-aware search applications. Keywords Social media analysis · History · Collective memory · Twitter
1 Introduction History is regarded as knowledge that plays a special role in our society. This is because the comprehension of history is useful for multiple reasons. First, one can better understand the processes impacting the present world. Second, history forms the basis for the development of coherent national and local identities. Third, history offers support for decision making and provides guidance as for what can await us in the future [1,23]. Due to these and other reasons, history is one of the key subjects that are taught in elementary schools as well as in the subsequent stages of education. Recently, social media and microblogs in particular have been often used as a convenient source for understanding public attitude towards entities or events (e.g., the US American elections [57]). Microblogs are also a platform useful for finding and sharing history-related content. Computational studies of references to the past in microblogs can then offer us novel perspectives for understanding the formation of collective memories and the pursuit of public history.
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Yasunobu Sumikawa [email protected]
Collective memory analyses based on large-scale data and using computational methods have been already carried either on news article collections [5,16] or Wikipedia data [19,20,35,36]. However, when it comes to microblogs, little research has been done. One notable project is the analysis of the memories related to the First World War in Twitter [14] from the multi-cultural perspective. Our work also focuses on Twitter which constitutes a popular social media platform frequently utilized for a variety of studies in the computational social sciences and other domains. The analysis we perform has exploratory character aiming to offer broad investigation of practices of sharing history-related content in microblogging platforms. The following questions are considered in our study: 1. How do users write about
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