The data used in “Documenting the Now” were of tweets and their metadata. The project stored this data by collecting “Tweet IDs” which were individual identifiers for every tweet ever written. The formatting of this data was a plain text file that could be downloaded after using the “DocNow” tool.
This file housed all the Tweet IDs that were pulled for any given data set. The reason it was stored this way so that when a user put that file through the “Hydrator” tool it would be able to identify what Tweets had been deleted by users so that it could be pulled from the data set.
After inputting the plain text file into “Hydrator” it would output a spreadsheet of the tweets and their conjoining meta data. Users would have been able to see up to date information like replies, likes, reposts, and number of comments along side the Tweet’s original content.
Data Relation to Digital Humanities Best Practices
Part of the data that this project relies on is meta data from tweets which is then archived within the final output of the spreadsheet from “Hydrator”. This relates back to Digital Humanities best practices as it is considered good standard to keep an accessible and organized collection of a projects meta data.