Shax450 Tweet archive and visualization

Created in April 2014 using Martin Hawksey’s TAGSExplorer and Google Spreadsheets, the #Shax450 Tweet Archive is an interactive archive and visualization of tweets that have used the hashtag #Shax450 on Twitter to celebrate William Shakespeare’s 450th birthday.

Using TAGS (Twitter Archiving Google Spreadsheet) technology, Hawksey’s TAGSExplorer tool visualizes Twitter conversations, connections, and user activity which are all related to a specific hashtag. This is achieved by hooking up to Twitter’s API and transferring relevant data to a Google Spreadsheet for organization and analysis.

Hashtags are used on social media sites to link various content of a similar nature together by keyword. A hashtag is a word or a phrase prefaced with a #, generally referred to as a “pound sign” or a “hash.” A hashtag does not support spaces or punctuation marks. The #Shax450 Tweet Archive has gathered all Twitter activity marked #Shax450 from April 16, 2014, on. This specific hashtag is largely Folger-centric and statistics related to the tag paint an interesting picture of social media interactions surrounding the birthday on Twitter.

The TAGSExplorer program hooks up to Twitter’s API and pulls activity related to the hashtag into a spreadsheet, runs analytics on the data, and generates a visualization of conversations and actions. The text of the Tweets is saved in the archive, along with relevant available metadata such as the day and time the Tweet was created, whether it was a stand-alone instance or if it generated interaction and conversation, and more. The Archive is updated for new information on a continual basis. The #Shax450 Tweet Archive can be accessed here, archive analytics here, and the interactive visualization here.

Learn more about additional web archiving activities at the Folger Shakespeare Library here.