To date, it has been challenging for researchers outside the company who are tackling big questions to collaborate with us to access our public, historical data. Our Data Grants program aims to change that by connecting research institutions and academics with the data they need. engineering.twitter.com/research/data-grants

Though the timeframes of both our Bute and Stoke community groups generally pre-date the age of social media, Twitter’s recent release of large data sets to research institutions has significance for Pararchive’s future.

Twitter’s archive is approaching a decade’s worth of real-time, geographically and temporally annotated data, sentiments, metadata and media. Taken as a whole, this represents a platform for enabling a kind of data archeology, one that future storytellers and researchers will find invaluable in exploring the past.

Actually, that brings to mind a wonderful phrase, coined by my friend Matt Edgar… The past is a platform from which we launch into the future.