The White House Announces Several New Tools to Access Archived Social Media From the Obama Administration

From The White House Blog:

At the end of October, we shared our plans for preserving and passing on the digital history of the Obama administration, and invited the American people to “come up with creative ways to archive this content and make it both useful and available for years to come.”
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…today we’re excited to share some of their innovative archival projects with you:

• ArchiveSocial, a social media archiving platform, is hosting an open archive consolidating more than a quarter-million White House social media posts that are easily searchable by date, platform, and keyword. The open archive is now available to the public at http://ObamaWhiteHouseArchive.social

• Rhizome, a digital art organization, is publishing a series of multi-media, digital essays that explain Internet culture associated with the Obama administration—starting with the history of the “Thanks Obama” meme, theFirst Lady’s Turnip Vine, and the #LoveWins hashtag on Instagram and Twitter. Learn more on Rhizome’s website.

• MIT Media Lab’s Electome group and Derek Lieu, a programmer, both used topical analysis to understand what issues the White House was talking about most on Twitter. Electome’s interactive tool compares Administration tweets with a sampling of citizen tweets, and Derek’s analysis examines and how White House tweet topics fluctuated over the course of the Administration.

• GIPHY, a GIF search engine, will launch a page that enables the public to view all of the GIFs that the White House has ever shared, as well as a collection of all of the White House’s Vines. The page will also include many other White House related GIFs that have been pulled together by GIPHY’s Editorial team. Check it out at giphy.com/Obama

• A new Twitter bot built by the Portland, Oregon-based studio, FeelTrain, will republish White House tweets over the next eight years to mark some of the most significant moments of the Obama administration as experienced on Twitter. Follow along by visiting @Relive44 on Twitter.

• Students will be diving into our social media data, too. At the University of Texas-Austin, students in Dr. Amelia Acker’s graduate seminar will be utilizing White House social media data in their final projects. And NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) Fellows are hosting an “Obamathon” on January 6th—a special hackathon to spawn the creation of new projects, like the ones listed above.

• Internet Archive is making White House social media data available to download from their website—ensuring it’s publicly-accessible for years to come—and hosting a public hackathon this Saturday, January 7th.

Filed under: Data Files, News, Publishing