Since the beginning of 2020, it has been an awesome experience working on Project Twitter Literature (“TwitLit”) in an effort to break down Twitter literature over the course of the past couple of years. I was stranger to the technique of “scraping” or “scrubbing” tweets, but was immediately engaged with the idea when I heard about the opportunity. I have always had a love for writing and in this new age where social media is everyone’s outlet to express themselves, and Dr. Christian Howard-Sukhil, who heads the project, made me understand the shift in literature in this new media era.

In particular, I have worked to scrape over 30 hashtags, some taking hours to process, while others only a matter of minutes. Once COVID-19 became a factor and our campus had to turn remote, our team continued to meet once a week in an effort to finish the job. Despite technical difficulties distances away, it was awesome to see how much work we accomplished. I was able to scrape all of the hashtags and upload them each to their own file on Google Drive, while Jimmy Pronchick, the other student research assistant on the team, hydrated and counted each tweet, uploading the finished project to the Drive. It was a long process because if at any point my laptop shut down or lost Wifi for a second, I would have to rescrape for the term in order to ensure it was accurate. We followed the scraping process as outlined on the project website; the scraping script is freely available for download on GitHub.
In the future, we will begin to interpret the data. On the TwitLit website, Christian has used line graphs to exemplify the growth of literature hashtags. She breaks it down into two different categories, “Writing Community” and “Fiction and Poetry”. This allows us to see the difference in what individuals are using as a platform to share to a greater audience. We will continue to do this for new data and try to think of creative ways to share it.

For more information on the project, visit the TwitLit website.