Still waiting on the Twitter Archive

The Library of Congress has not backed away from its plan to archive every public Tweet ever.

That was the big news in this recent Buzzfeed post. Just what the archive will look like and when it will be available is less clear, according to the post’s author John Herman.

As of several months ago, Herman reported, the library was still struggling with technical barriers and didn’t have a timeline for when the archive would be up and running.

It may only have been clear in retrospect how monumental a task the library was taking on. Twitter was logging about 50 million tweets per day when the deal was inked. That’s up to 400 million per day now and is likely still rising.

To catalogue all those Tweets in some searchable way must be a daunting task. The benefits to future researchers, though, could be equally momentous as early research in Twitter as a predictive tool has demonstrated. If the site maintains popularity -- which is a big “if” -- it could serve as something like a collective unconscious for future researchers to mine for evidence about what (at least some of) the masses were really thinking about this trend or that policy decision.

The percentage of the world on Twitter will likely remain comparatively small and somewhat skewed, of course, but it is, by any stretch, larger and more diverse than the sample in any opinion poll in history.