What to do with your Twitter archive

I requested my Twitter archive yesterday and downloaded it today, all 1.77 GB as a ZIP file.

Great. So I asked myself now that I have it: What can I import my Twitter archive data to?

That got me to this nice Guide to “How to preserve your personal Twitter archive” from the Bitsgalore (digital preservation - file formats) site.

It’s great! Not only does it cover getting the archive (already done), but it walks you through various shortcomings and annoyances in the format of the downloaded archive. For example, links in the tweet archive are their t.co-URL-shortened versions, but the expanded and display URLs are available elsewhere in the archive. The Guide covers tools that can fix this and many, many other issues. It also provides links to other approaches and, extremely useful, covers some options on how to present tweets from your archive if that’s what you are looking to do.

All good stuff. It was first published on November 20, 2022, and it has been updated through December 15, 2022. As the guide notes, the development of tools like archive parser currently moves at a pretty fast pace.

Why “Chicagoland”

WBEZ’s Curious City looks into “Chicagoland,” the term, its origins, purpose, and definition—its boundaries.

Chicago Tribune publisher Robert R. “Colonel” McCormick commissioned James O’Donnell Bennett to write a series of Chicago region travel articles.

That’s how the word made its first appearance nearly 100 years ago in the July 27, 1926 edition of the Chicago Tribune. Across the front page was a story by O’Donnell Bennett titled “Chicagoland’s Shrines: A Tour of Discoveries.”

The subhed for that first story was notably “Our Own Midwest, Scenic and Historic, Revealed.” Chicagoland was the Midwest with Chicago at its center, a Tribune-defined region Tribune readers identified with or would-be Tribune readers wanted to identify with, a region invented and boosted to sell newspapers.

Curious City argues that this early Chicagoland major gave way over time to a more localized, more suburbanized, near-Chicago Chicagoland minor—even though one of their own exhibits, the fantastic Chicago Tribune 1927 Special Detailed Road Map of Chicagoland, shows that the Chicagoland minor existed alongside the Chicagoland major essentially from the very start. The point stands, though, the the idea of “Chicagoland” being a term that could be applied to the Midwest has largely faded.

I’ve generally disliked the term, but I can see its usefulness as potential a way for us suburbanites to accurately express where we’re from without saying we’re “from Chicago”—a geographic rounding or exaggeration that drives actual Chicagoans crazy.

Chicago Reader, my former colleagues, and I won the 2023 AAN Award for Special Section

The Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN) held its 2023 AAN Journalism Awards ceremony and announced first-place winners this past Friday, July 21, 2023, at The Rose Room in Dallas, Texas, during the 2023 TexAAN AAN Convention. The Chicago Reader, Seven Days (Vermont), and Willamette Week (Portland) led with four first-place wins each.

I was especially excited to see:

First Place: Chicago Reader – “The People Issue (Volume 52, Number 3)” – Enrique Limón, Salem Collo-Julin, Kirk Williamson, Amber Huff, Sujay Kumar, Jim Daley, Kerry Reid, Philip Montoro, Taryn Allen, Kerry Cardoza, Jamie Ludwig, Leor Galil, Deanna Isaacs, Ben Joravsky, Mike Sula, Debbie-Marie Brown, Kelly Garcia, Katie Prout, Micco Caporale, John Dunlevy

Judge’s Comment: “This report is executed in a fantastic way, from the thoughtful mix of people featured to the surprising details found in each profile. A refreshing take on a tried-and-true special report concept.”

It was such a privilege to have been part of the team doing this work, and it’s an honor to be recognized with them. I’m absolutely in awe of all the writers, editors, and designers—and the photographers!—who contributed. I knew this was something special when we published it in November 2022 (previously). The People Issue exists as an online package and as a PDF of the print issue.

Other Chicago Reader first place wins were for Food Writing (Mike Sula, including “Something magic’s growing at Back of the Yards Algae Sciences”, edited by Taryn Allen, Karen Hawkins), Arts Feature (“Will lightning strike Podlasie Club twice?” by Micco Caporale, edited by Philip Montoro), and Innovation / Format Buster (Visual arts coverage by Coco Picard, including for an illustrated conversation with artist Anna Martine Whitehead edited by Salem Collo-Julin). The Chicago Reader was also among the finalists in three other categories.

It’s also great to see the Reader’s former sister publication, The Washington City Paper with a first place win and well represented among the finalists, including snagging second place for their own The People Issue 2022.

See the full list of finalists and winners in order on the AAN website.

Updated August 2, 2023: The Reader has posted a press release covering these wins along with Excellence-in-Features journalism awards and Peter Lisagor Awards won “over the past few months.”

John Scalzi:

We could go on about how Musk will be an immediate business school case study for taking the value of a unique, universally-known and globally-appreciated brand and absolutely trashing it in exchange for a symbol best known for porn and/or the button you press on your computer whenever you want to leave something, but… well, actually, I kind of want to talk about the latter! With the switchover in name, I think this is a fine time to start disentangling myself from Musk’s Folly, whatever it is called, and manage my presence there differently than I have over these last 15 years when it was known as Twitter.

Yep.

I’ve uninstalled X Corp.’s (still curiously called “Twitter”) app from my phone and laptop. I’m not totally leaving Twitter/X, but I plan to be deliberately much less active. For posting purposes, for now at least I’m active—and I believe increasingly active—on both Mastodon and Threads. (I keep the list of my social media and platform links on my homepage: dunlevy.org/john/).

For news consumption, I’m hopeful about Mastodon and Threads, though neither is really there yet. I have seen some great commentary especially on both, but nothing on the scale of what was available on Twitter. On the other hand, “real-time” Twitter could get to be a bit much—unhealthy even.

J.R. Nelson and Leor Galil in yesterday “Gossip Wolf” column:

In April, the student-run Program Coordinating Council, which allocates student government money every year, gave WHPK $20,600 for its next annual budget—about 35 percent of its $57,490 request. … This year the council covered only operating costs, so WHPK needs help—it wants the university to continue to pay for the upkeep of its equipment, the way it maintains other school facilities.

The opportunity to take action:

anyone interested in supporting WHPK can add their name to the public letter of appeal or directly contact the Center for Leadership and Involvement.

Block Club Chicago has a story about the situation as well: “WHPK, University Of Chicago Radio Station With Deep Ties To The South Side, In Trouble After Funding Slashed” by Noah Glasgow.

Some great stuff here from Oriol Salvador, the first in his series collecting his “thoughts after attending the 3-day Transformation Boost course at Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, in New York City” earlier this month. This is well worth a read, and this is what’s jumping out at me at least initially:

Social media is still a great (free) place to build your brand and find new audiences that discover you and then proactively seek out your content. You might need to look at different metrics, conversions instead of click-throughs, and please (PLEASE!) ignore vanity metrics like followers or likes. Most likely, you need to re-evaluate your overall content strategy for social media channels, as well. Short vertical video is here to stay…

And:

The key to sustain a digital news venture in this platform-agnostic, ever-changing and challenging environment is to build your own audiences, not relying on third parties. Focus on a responsive and engaging website and additional products, like newsletters or apps, where you own the data of your audience, so you can reach out to them more effectively.

A lot of assumptions built in to this job application question

Will you now or in the future require visa sponsorship for full time employment?*

I’ve been answering “No” for the U.S.-based jobs I’m applying for, assuming each company is asking this question just about this specific job. Though it’s certainly unlikely, visa sponsorship being a future requirement for U.S. citizens to work in the U.S. is something that could happen given the right set of very extreme circumstances. And if I ever decide to work outside of the U.S., I may in fact require visa sponsorship of some sort depending on the rules of the country in which I’m applying for a jobs. Again, I’m answering this question for each job on the assumption that it pertains to the job currently being applied for—though it’s a question I’m seeing consistently asked is very general, wide-open, unversal terms.

A nonprofit that aims to maintain local ownership for newspapers will buy 22 papers in Maine, including The Portland Press Herald and The Sun Journal of Lewiston. The National Trust for Local News, a nonprofit that was started in 2021, will buy the papers from Masthead Maine, a private company that owns most of the independent media outlets in the state, including five of its six daily papers. Masthead Maine’s owner, Reade Brower, had signaled this year that he was exploring a sale.

Of course, there is still some ambiguity as to the purpose these puns served in relation to the text. Michael Camille seemed to favour a rather antagonistic interpretation, suggesting that the crudeness and irreverence of these illustrations were the artist’s way of hitting back at the scribe and even at the scripture itself and undermining the written word. [Betsy] Chunko-Dominguez theorises a more harmonious relationship, noting how the rich and dynamic imagery could have highlighted key textual themes in a manner that was engaging and memorable to the reader, forming a sort of dialogue between word and margin—not an argument.

From the archives: A roundup of old “Did you read” blog posts

I've gone back and gathered links to old Chicago Reader “Did You Read __________?” blog posts that I contributed items to from 2012 to 2016. These posts were all “authored” by “Reader staff” with attibution to the individual contributors appearing in the body text next to their contributed items. So like some other things with the top-level byline done in this way, they don't appear on individual contributors’ author archives pages.

I got the post URLs using Google Search and then wrote a PHP script pulling all the URLs from the Search results into an array and fetching each post’s headline, subheadline, and publication date, sorting it all in reverse chronological order, and then outputting a useful list of links in nice HTML for presentation on the web. It’s probably most but not all of these posts that I contributed to.

(Among possibly other things, this let me add these to my Muckrack portfolio.)

“Did You Read __________?” [snapshot in the Wayback Machine at archive.org] was a topic series—you can think of it simply as a blog—that started in January 2012 in The Bleader blog (previously “The Blog,” sort of a single-company blog network or parent blog under which individual blogs or sub-blogs existed) on chicagoreader.com that ran initially as a more-or-less daily place for Reader staff to share interesting things, usually articles, from elsewhere on the web, sort of quick-hit link sharing. It shared links to “stories that fascinate, alarm, amuse, or inspire us.”

It was the successor to “What the Reader’s Reading” [Wayback Machine snapshot], a regularly updated feed of links from early 2010 to late 2011 powered by a news-aggregation platform called Publish2 that the Creative Loafing folks were especially excited about but did actually do some cool microblogging things including tagging and categorizing content and, if I recall, also had some rudimentary social media-type features built in. Links shared this way were presented in various places on the site, especially on the Reader homepage and on section-specific posts (e.g. music-tagged links [Wayback Machine] on music posts) and on section table of contents [Wayback Machine] pages.

Later, the idea of daily “Did you read” posts as compilations of staff contributions was dropped and freelancer Kate Shepherd wrote all the posts for the rest of the series from January 2016 until it was discontinued after Valentine’s Day in February 2018—at a particularly tumultuous time in the Reader’s history.

Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS)

I came across this by quite the circuitous route, but it’s very cool and I think exactly fits the bill of what I was looking for as a way to index—and increase discoverability of—and present audio and video content like interviews and first-person narratives—whether “oral histories” or not.

OHMS is a two-piece system for, first (free web account required), creating a timecoded index (and) or transcript from an audio video source and then, second, an open-source way of presenting that audio or video on the web so that it is searchable and allows for easy navigation to specific points of interest from the index.

Reading up on OHMS in turn led me to Omeka, a new-to-me open source CMS and web platform—or rather “platforms for sharing digital collections and creating media-rich online exhibits.” I could see this being useful not just for sites for libraries, museums, exhibits, and the humanities, but also for news and journalism projects—thinking deep-dive sorts of treatments and “microsites.”

Links:

Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS) site

How to start using OHMS

OHMS Viewer README at github

Using OHMS with Omeka

Omeka

“OHMS and Omeka: The OHMS Plugin Suite” by Douglas A. Boyd, March 6, 2019, digitalomnium.com

Finally, how great is this 2013 Leonard Nimoy oral history from the Yiddish Book Center? It’s a great demostration of OHMS, but also a great unusual narrative from Nimoy, who is at least trying to speak Yiddish throughout. Fascinating!

The U.S. Is Paying Billions to Russia’s Nuclear Agency. Here’s Why.

Nuclear power companies rely on cheap enriched uranium made in Russia. That geopolitical dilemma is intensifying as climate change underscores the need for emissions-free energy.

By Max Bearak, nytimes.com

The United States’ reliance on nuclear power is primed to grow as the country aims to decrease reliance on fossil fuels. But no American-owned company enriches uranium. The United States once dominated the market, until a swirl of historical factors, including an enriched-uranium-buying deal between Russia and the United States designed to promote Russia’s peaceful nuclear program after the Soviet Union’s collapse, enabled Russia to corner half the global market. The United States ceased enriching uranium entirely.

The AI feedback loop: Researchers warn of ‘model collapse’ as AI trains on AI-generated content

As another of the paper’s authors, Ross Anderson, professor of security engineering at Cambridge University and the University of Edinburgh, wrote in a blog post discussing the paper: “Just as we’ve strewn the oceans with plastic trash and filled the atmosphere with carbon dioxide, so we’re about to fill the Internet with blah. This will make it harder to train newer models by scraping the web, giving an advantage to firms which already did that, or which control access to human interfaces at scale. Indeed, we already see AI startups hammering the Internet Archive for training data.”

The paper is here:

Shumailov, Ilia, Zakhar Shumaylov, Yiren Zhao, Yarin Gal, Nicolas Papernot, and Ross Anderson. "The Curse of Recursion: Training on Generated Data Makes Models Forget." arXiv, May 2023. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.17493.

Though one of the first uses of the term “spoiler” in this sense was apparently documented in print only in 1971 [Wikipedia], the concern that plot elements shouldn’t be given away if they would undermine suspense was very much an idea more than a decade earlier.

In her March 1960 “Reader’s Choice” review of Colin Wilson’s Ritual in the Dark in The Atlantic (page 114), Phoebe Adams expresses the passively threatening sentiment that “it ought to be a hanging offense to give away a plot that an author has carefully arranged to keep the readers’ curiosity on the boil.”

Though I, Luddite-like, was reading this in a print copy of the magazine I came across very much offline, the article is available in digitized form.

There’s more, incidentally, on Adams in a farewell interview in the August 2000 issue, and more of her writing is in the extensive and well-organized online archives at theatlantic.com.

Colin Wilson [Wikipedia] “also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books.”

Alarming developments in China.

“China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has made arts and culture a central arena for ideological crackdowns, demanding that artists align their creative ambitions with Chinese Communist Party goals and promote a nationalist vision of Chinese identity.”

Meet the Press - Cincinnati Style

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