kdonovan11
Member
I would like to capture tweets from last year which centered on a particular social movement in Kenya. Many of them were sent or retweeted by @ConsumersKenya, so simply getting an archive of their tweets within a certain timeframe would be quite helpful. Being able to get those who used relevant hashtags during that period would also be fruitful.
There seem to be plenty of services to archive ongoing tweets, but is there a good way to get historical tweets for certain dates?
kdonovan11
Member
Replying to @kdonovan11's post:
I see that it is possible to use Twitter's Advanced Search to search for a particular account's tweets during a given time period; however, that requires scrolling through it all on their site. What would be best is the ability to export them (links, images, and all).
Replying to @kdonovan11's post:
The Twitter API supports retrieving the last 3,200 tweets from a user's timeline. A commandline tool like Twarc (https://github.com/docnow/twarc) can be used to get the user's timeline from the API. If you're looking for web interface, Social Feed Manager (https://gwu-libraries.github.io/sfm-ui/), which I work on, is another option.
Options for getting historical tweets for a hashtag are much more limited. The Search API only indexes the last 7-9 days. The search on Twitter's website indexes further back in time, but the nature of what is indexed (and not indexed) is unknown.
Data service providers such as DiscoverText (https://discovertext.com/) allow for greater access to historical data, but obviously at a cost.
Replying to @justinlittman's post:
Thanks Justin. DiscoverText (https://discovertext.com) is an option for day-forward Twitter via the Search API or using the Gnip PowerTrack. For historical Twitter, people need to use Sifter (https://sifter.texifter.com) to generate up to three free estimates per day. If there is an estimate you like, there is a price to access the data using DiscoverText.
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