A Collection of MLA Conference Twitter Archives

A collection of datasets containing tweets tagged with MLA conference hashtags. For methodology, limitations and other important information please read the description of each dataset.

Rationale

Tweets published publicly by scholars during academic conferences are often tagged (labeled) with a hashtag dedicated to the conference in question.

The purpose of the hashtag is to organise and describe information/outputs under the relevant label in order to enhance the discoverability of the labeled information/outputs (tweets in this case). Those tagging their public tweets with a conference hashtag do so as a means to contribute publicly to the scholarly conversation around conferences.

Professional associations like the Modern Language Association recognise tweets as citeable scholarly outputs. Archiving scholarly tweets is a means to preserve this form of rapid online scholarship that otherwise can very likely become unretrievable as time passes; Twitter's search API has well-known temporal limitations for retrospective historical search and collection. Beyond individual tweets as scholarly outputs, the collective scholarly activity on Twitter around a conference or academic project or event can provide interest insights for the contemporary history of scholarly communications. To date, collecting in real time is the only relatively accurate method to archive tweets at a small scale. 

No sensitive nor confidential information is contained in these datasets.

Shared for educational and archival use.