Digital History meets Microblogging
Yasunobu Sumikawa, Adam Jatowt, Marten Düring · 2018
Having good knowledge and comprehension of history is believed to be important for a variety of reasons. Microblogging platforms could offer good opportunities to study how and when people explicitly refer to the past, in which context such references appear and what purpose they serve. However, this area remains unexplored. In this paper we report the results of a large scale exploratory analysis of history-focused references in microblogs based on 11-months long snapshot of Twitter data. We are the first to analyze general historical references in Twitter based on large scale data analysis. The results of this study can be used for designing content recommendation systems and could help to improve time aware search applications.