Analyzing history-related posts in twitter

Yasunobu Sumikawa,Adam Jatowt

doi:10.1007/s00799-020-00296-2

Yasunobu Sumikawa, Adam Jatowt

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s00799-020-00296-2

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Abstract

Microblogging platforms such as Twitter have been increasingly used nowadays to share information between users. They are also convenient means for propagating content related to history. Hence, from the research viewpoint they can offer opportunities to analyze the way in which users refer to the past, and how as well when such references appear and what purposes they serve. Such study could allow to quantify the interest degree and the mechanisms behind content dissemination. We report the results of a large scale exploratory analysis of history-oriented posts in microblogs based on a 28-month-long snapshot of Twitter data. The results can increase our understanding of the characteristics of history-focused content sharing in Twitter. They can also be used for guiding the design of content recommendation systems as well as time-aware search applications.

Highlights

History is regarded as knowledge that plays a special role in our society
– Based on the rates of entity types collected from DBpedia (Fig. 3), we conclude that persons, places and groups tend to be frequently mentioned in history-focused tweets and the person category is especially common in these types of tweets
The similarity score between Historical Events and Historical Entities is quite high as many famous entities in our dataset were involved in key events (e.g., Stalin, Hitler in WWII). – Temporal category analysis (Fig. 20) demonstrated that the tweets under the General Commemoration category relate to many diverse years in the past

Summary

Introduction

History is regarded as knowledge that plays a special role in our society. This is because the comprehension of history is useful for multiple reasons. One can better understand the processes impacting the present world. History offers support for decision making and provides guidance as for what can await us in the future [1,23]. Due to these and other reasons, history is one of the key subjects that are taught in elementary schools as well as in the subsequent stages of education

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Conclusion