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.
