Isaac Koi - New Uploads

(The code to archive Twitter posts as PDFs developed by QEDJoe is now also freely available online and may also be of interest to those outside the UFO community since it could be applied to other material as well...).

Frankly, I'm not the world's biggest fan of Twitter or the discussion of UFOs on it. I find too many of the posts about UFOs on Twitter are extremely polarised, to the point that those posts don't really contribute to the discussion. Polarisation in discussions of ufology has been a problem for decades, but Twitter appears exacerbate this issue. Also, the restriction on the length of posts can get in the way of providing supporting references or follow-through on the points being made.

But ... the discussion of UFOs on Twitter is now a significant part of the culture of modern ufology, so someone should be making a bit of an effort to archive it. Also, many links have been posted on Twitter that may be difficult to find in the future without preserving these posts. Furthermore, the speed of communication and the size of the community on Twitter mean that it has the potential (although, sadly, this potential is rarely fulfilled...) for issues to be examined in depth relatively quickly.

So, during the last few months I have been keen to archive at least a sample of posts about UFOs on Twitter. I found some code online which was intended to parse Twitter archives into text files and was able to adapt it to work on an archive of my own Tweets to convert them to PDFs (after overcoming an encoding issue with the original code). Unfortunately, the code would not work on archives of tweets provided by some other researchers that kindly offered to act as guinea pigs.

The effort to archive Twitter material relating to UFOs (and, potentially, other topics) was given a _major_ boost recently when someone with considerably more computer coding skills than me kindly agreed to help out. "QEDJoe", a physicist with an interest in Forteana, very promptly sorted out the code I had been struggling with, getting it to work and then making some improvements. Crucially, he also stuck around to deal with some issues that arose with material provided by other researchers. That persistence eventually paid off and the code now seems to be able to cope with any Twitter archive I've thrown at it recently.