Twitter’s Historical Archives: Information Flow, Official Discourse and Social Movements

Digital media and social media has transformed perceptions and documentation of time and space. The social media platform Twitter, through brevity and immediacy, shapes and determines a new notion of the ongoing historical development. This paper presents an analysis of a dataset of Tweets published by the Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto between August 2014 and January 2015, extracting Tweets that refer to important recent historical events in Mexico. Using Timeline JS3 a visualisation has been created to analyse correlations between the content of Tweets and these key historical events. Text analysis techniques have also been used to offer a content and sentiment analysis of the dataset. The paper offers an analysis of how Twitter allows for a reconfiguration of information flow and of historical construction through deceivingly minimal linguistic outputs