Two researchers at Old Dominion University recently published a study entitled "Losing My Revolution" exploring the degree to which our historical record of events via social media like Twitter is disappearing due to posts being removed or deleted. They focus on some of the recent events that were documented extensively via social media (The Arab Spring, the H1N1 flu outbreak, and maybe most importantly, Michael Jackson's death) and look at how many of the original posts on that subject were now missing or deleted as a function of time. They find that the material is lost at a rate of 0.02% a day. After two years 27% of pages that helped shaped our present are lost to time.
Two things to point out to my research methods students: (1) Look, you can do historical research and quantitative analysis at the same time! and (2) This might be a cool project to extend with your own analysis of events that were particularly important in Wisconsin history recently such as the Madison protests and the Walker Recall (or the Packer Super Bowl victory!)
Also, I'd be curious to hear how the historians in our department feel about things like Twitter being the primary documents of the future?
Via: Centives.net
A helpful comment from one blog putting this in a somewhat better perspective:
ReplyDelete"And how much of history from 1960 was lost?
How about 1860?
How about 4000BC?
We've actually improved retention of history a millionfold :)"
Thank you CraigT - this makes me feel much better