Twitter Archiving
WAIL contain specialized code to allow a user to preserve parts of Twitter.
If you have not signed into Twitter before through WAIL when accessing the Twitter Archival feature then this section will be displaying a message asking you to sign in. For more information about the sign in process please visit the Twitter Authorization section of this wiki.
Currently, there are two options for Twitter archival feature implemented in WAIL.
The first is monitoring a user’s timeline for tweets which were tweeted after the monitoring has started with the option of selecting only the tweets containing hashtags specified during configuration.
The second, a slight variation of the first, will only archive tweets that have specific keywords in the tweet’s body as specified during configuration.
The interface for this is seen below.
Both share the same general configuration parameters
- How Long To Monitor
-
The length in time to monitor the feed, times are between five minutes to ten hours.
WAIL must be left running for duration of the monitoring. - Screen Name
- The screen name of the Twitter user whose timeline to monitor
- For Collection
- The collection to which the archive will be added to
For example, the general configuration for monitoring a user's timeline can be seen below
Where the two modes differ is in the additional configuration options.
| Optional | Not Optional |
|---|---|
 |
 |
The hashtags option available when archiving all tweets when monitoring a user's timeline is optional.
A situation when this optional filtering criterion would be desired is when a user is a heavy tweeter and includes the same hashtag(s) in those tweets but the body of those tweets do not share similar terms.
This is the primary distinction between the two modes.