Sometimes I wonder if I just get carried away with some big research schemes that realistically I can’t undertake alone. For example, preparing for my big presentation this weekend @ Rutgers, I discovered that I cannot access all the data for comparison purposes. I tried Twitter help but haven’t received any response.
If you aren’t already aware of my research project, my students are on 
micro-blogging 3x a week about whatever they wish. For the first 4 weeks, it was a tight, academic community-professors & students only, thank you. Last week, I introduced some native target language speakers, 5 Italians ranging in age from 23-30 something, and now some SMS and comments are being made that has already exceeded my expectations. Now, when I try to go back to the posts from the first 4 weeks, I cannot get a timeline from the start of the project and I am literally copying and pasting statuses posts individually and matching up the exchanges with replies. It is annoying, onerous and truly time-consuming.
Does anyone know how to download posts so that I don’t lose the data forever nor waste any more time on this burdensome task? I could really use some help… 
2 Comments
28 Feb 2008 at 02:09
A suggestion from a local blogger who twitters:
“If you go to the twitter website and sign in, then look at your own archive, you can go back as far as you’d like. She’d have to have all of her research subjects to that then compile them.”
So have your students compile and each submit their archive.
29 Feb 2008 at 02:00
Thanks for the suggestion, fivehusbands, it is greatly appreciated. I would have loved to be able to preserve the timeline, but a cut & paste from their saved archive is more efficient than me doing it for them.