Getting free banana from anti-evolutionist on street outside #Evol2014 pic.twitter.com/FLL5zmOHgA
— Mohamed Noor (@mafnoor) June 21, 2014
I think it’s fair to say that I was a pioneer of Twitter at the Evolution meetings—back when I set up the website for Evolution 2009, I created an account for the conference, and signed up for one myself. I think maybe six unique people ever tweeted the #Evol2009 hashtag, and they mostly used it to exchange notes about where to find better coffee than what the University of Idaho catering service provided.
Five years later, at this year’s iteration of the meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, Evolution was all over Twitter. Far from being worried about over-publicizing preliminary work, attendees broadcast everything from their talk slides to mockery of the tiny, absurd protest outside the convention center.
When I ran a search for the meeting hashtag, #Evol2014, on ScraperWiki, I ended up with a file containing almost 9,000 tweets (including retweets) from 20 to 24 June. Here’s what they looked like on an hourly basis:
I may play around with some additional analysis of this dataset, but I’m not sure when I’ll have time—so I thought I’d use it as an excuse to (finally) try out Figshare. If your interest is piqued, you can download the original data here, and see what you can do with it.
Yoder, JB. 2014. #Evol2014 in tweets. figshare. doi: 10.6084/m9.figshare.1083874
