Twitter is becoming an increasingly important news channel, as evidenced during the
presidential debates and the
Republican National Convention. Here in the Twin Cities, monitoring the RNC-related "tweetstream" (the flow of 140-character posts that make up Twitter) allowed small and indy news outlets to compete with the major papers and TV stations -- and sometimes to scoop them.
However, Twitter is by nature ephemeral: One tweet (a single post) is succeeded by another, and another, and another. (For an excellent demonstration of this, visit Twitter's mesmerizing election page, where tweets post, slide down the page and drop off with dizzying speed.) Although you can search Twitter for past tweets, its search engine is not excellent, and makes it hard to capture the flow of the conversation as it occurred.
That's problematic if what was said on Twitter was an important part of the unfolding (and public understanding) of an event. For someone looking back at an event such as the RNC for narrative or historical analysis purposes, recapturing the freshness of the tweetstream is a necessity -- and a challenge.
But for the 2008 RNC at least, someone is trying. On Oct. 8, Jeff Severns Guntzel wrote in the Minnesota Independent (a site that delivered excellent RNC coverage, in part because of its use of Twitter and other Web 2.0 tools) about an effort by artist/journalist/web designer Nigel Parry to building a crowdsourced online archive of every document relevant to the RNC and the public unrest that surrounded it. Parry's including tweetstreams in the mix.
Parry has past experience with crowdsourced reassembling of history: He founded the Electronic Intifada, a citizen journalism site about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the Palestinian perspective. But his RNC effort comes from a personal place: He shared lodging during the convention with out-of-town indy filmmakers who were preemptively detailed by police before the convention began.
His new site, RNC '08 Report, currently includes an archive of 239 documents and is actively soliciting anything that might be relevant -- from personal recollections to academic research to copies of mainstream media text, video and audio.
"It's the widest possible range of sources because that's what will be the most helpful" to understanding the civil unrest and law enforcement's reaction, Parry told Gunzel. "The goal is clarity."
