Tweets as Sources in the History of Contemporary Science

What was once the ultimate in the fleeting world of ephemera, the tweet, is now being archived by the most august library in the land. The Library of Congress is archiving about 500 million tweets per day, up from 140 million per day just two years ago. As Twitter processes 58 million tweets per day, this is still only about ten times the number of tweets that continue to be tweeted every day. But as of January 2013, the Library of Congress had archived a total of 170 billion tweets in 133.2 terabytes. A more extensive textual repository of ephemera related to today's world – a treasure trove for Twitterstorians – can scarcely be imagined. That said, I'm not entirely sure what exactly a Twitterstorian is. I don't tweet, I don't have a Twitter account, I don't follow anyone, and no one follows me. (I believe that in technology-speak this would classify me as a 'late adopter'.) But I have found Twitter to be a very useful source in writing the history of contemporary science. For the past decade, I have been following an emerging field of biological engineering known as 'synthetic biology'. While I don't live-tweet conferences myself, I complement my historical fieldwork by following the conference Twitter feed. Twitter has been remarkably useful to me in writing this history, serving as a 'silent spring' of information that has enabled me to learn more in real time about events and conversations not visible or audible even while sitting in the conference room itself (about activists outside a meeting who were distributing an open letter of protest, eg.). I have even used tweets as sources in my published work to highlight certain dynamics of the conference and the community. At one recent conference at Stanford, the public presentation of a paper that was not being simultaneously webcast led to a series of fascinating tweets debating the nature of disclosure, which made for the perfect beginning of a paper on intellectual property issues. 1 Twitter has thus been very useful to me in my own scholarly path, figuring out how to fit together archival work with historical fieldwork when writing the history of contemporary science. When a historian cites a textual source, it is recognisable as history. But when a historian cites something that happened in their presence, and the only textual remnant of it is in their own notes, the …