ITC Topic Class (possible topic): Library of Congress in The U.S. to Archive Tweets

Here's an edited down version of the full transcript of a radio broadcast which you can find here:  http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126086325

HOST: Andy Carvin, senior strategist for NPR's social media desk is here in the studio.



CARVIN: Twitter in many ways has become the pulse of what's going on online right now. Because it's a real-time conversation that anyone can chime into at any given point, it's 24-7. And so when something happens somewhere in the world you're almost guaranteed that people will be talking about it or even witnessing it as it happens, whether it's protests and revolution in Kyrgyzstan to people talking about the ham sandwich they just ate and everything in between. 

And so there are already ways that any of us on any given day can go and find information we're looking for. 




HOST: A Librarian of Congress, James Billington, said the Twitter digital archive has extraordinary potential for research into our contemporary way of life. What do you think tweets are going to tell us about ourselves in 100 years? 




CARVIN: Twitter captures everything and you're going to get a sampling of what life was like at its most mundane and banal and at its most tense and exciting and disturbing because it really is just a reflection of what's going on at any given moment.
And so it makes research rather onerous in some ways but at the same time, historians and archaeologists are always often looking for the mundane because you can't always tell what everyday people were doing.