Paris and Nice terrorist attacks: Exploring Twitter and web archives

The attacks suffered by France in January and November 2015, and then in the course of 2016, especially the Nice attack, provoked intense online activity both during the events and in the months that followed. The digital traces left by this reactivity and reactions to events gave rise, from the ver...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Media, war & conflict war & conflict, 2019-06, Vol.12 (2), p.153-170
Main Authors: Schafer, Valérie, Truc, Gérôme, Badouard, Romain, Castex, Lucien, Musiani, Francesca
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Archives & records
Digital archives
Exploitation
Governance
History
History, Philosophy and Sociology of Sciences
Humanities and Social Sciences
Internet
Library and information sciences
Social networks
Sociology
Special Issue Articles
Terrorism
Web archiving
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Summary:The attacks suffered by France in January and November 2015, and then in the course of 2016, especially the Nice attack, provoked intense online activity both during the events and in the months that followed. The digital traces left by this reactivity and reactions to events gave rise, from the very first days and even hours after the attacks, to a 'real-time' institutional archiving by the National Library of France (Bibliothèque nationale de France, BnF) and the National Audiovisual Institute (Institut national de l'audiovisuel, Ina). The results amount to millions of archived tweets and URLs. This article seeks to highlight some of the most significant issues raised by these relatively unprecedented corpora, from collection to exploitation, from online stream of data to its mediation and re-composition. Indeed, web archiving practices in times of emergency and crises are significant, almost emblematic, loci to explore the human and technical agencies, and the complex temporalities, of 'born-digital' heritage. The cases examined here emphasize the way these 'emergency collections' challenge the perimeters and the very nature of web archives as part of our digital and societal heritage, and the guiding visions of its governance and mission. Finally, the present analysis underlines the need for a careful contextualization of the design process — both of original web pages or tweets and of their archived images — and of the tools deployed to collect, retrieve and analyse them.
ISSN:1750-6352
1750-6360
DOI:10.1177/1750635219839382