000000060 001__ 60
000000060 005__ 20241014094319.0
000000060 02470 $$ahttps://doi.org/10.3886/bqy1-vn08$$2DOI
000000060 037__ $$aADMIN
000000060 245__ $$aNot With a Bang But a Tweet: Democracy, Culture Wars, and the Memeification of T.S. Eliot
000000060 251__ $$av1.1
000000060 269__ $$a2024-10-04
000000060 336__ $$aDataset
000000060 510__ $$aWalsh, Melanie and Preus, Anna. Not With a Bang But a Tweet: Democracy, Culture Wars, and the Memeification of T.S. Eliot. Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2024-10-04. https://doi.org/10.3886/bqy1-vn08
000000060 520__ $$aThis dataset includes posts from Twitter (now X) from 2006 to early 2022 that mentioned a variation of T.S. Eliot's famous lines "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper" (see "Design" for specific search terms used).
<br><br>
Modernist poet T.S. Eliot concluded his 1925 poem "The Hollow Men" with the iconic lines: "This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper." When Eliot died in 1965, the New York Times claimed in his obituary that these lines were “probably the most quoted lines of any 20th-century poet writing in English.” They may be among the most memed lines, as well. Through a computational analysis of Twitter data, we have found that at least 350,000 tweets have referenced or remixed Eliot’s lines since the beginning of Twitter’s history in 2006. While references to the poem vary widely, we focus on two prominent political usages of the phrase — cases where Twitter users invoke it to warn about the state of modern democracy, often from the left side of the political spectrum, and cases where they use the phrase to critique political correctness and “cancel culture” or to mock people for non-normatized aspects of their identities, often from the right side of the political spectrum. Though some of the tweets cite Eliot directly, most do not, and in many cases the phrase almost seems to be moving from an authored quotation into a common idiom or turn-of-phrase. Linguistics experts increasingly refer to this kind of construction as a “snowclone” —a fixed phrasal template, often with a culturally salient source (e.g., a quotation from a book, TV show, or movie), that has “one or more variable slots” into which users insert various “lexical substitutions" (Hartmann and Ungerer). This data thus enables researchers to study both the circulation of literature and the evolution of linguistic forms.
000000060 540__ $$aThis dataset has one level of access: Login Required.
<ul>
<li>Login Required files can be downloaded directly from the dataset record, once you have created and logged in to your SOMAR account. By downloading data files you agree to <a href="https://socialmediaarchive.org/pages/?page=Terms%20of%20Use&ln=en">ICPSR’s Terms of Use</a>.</li>
</ul>
000000060 650__ $$aliterature
000000060 650__ $$asocial media
000000060 650__ $$apresidential election
000000060 655__ $$aweb platform data
000000060 720__ $$aWalsh, Melanie$$eData Collector$$uUniversity of Washington$$10000-0003-4558-3310$$2ORCID$$3melwalsh@uw.edu$$7Personal
000000060 720__ $$aPreus, Anna$$eResearcher$$uUniversity of Washington$$3apreus@uw.edu$$7Personal
000000060 791__ $$tNot With a Bang But a Tweet: Democracy, Culture Wars, and the Memeification of T.S. Eliot [Forthcoming]$$aBook Section$$eIs Derived From
000000060 791__ $$tNot With a Bang But a Tweet: Democracy, Culture Wars, and the Memeification of T.S. Eliot$$aAudiovisual Material$$eIs Derived From$$whttps://mediaspace.illinois.edu/media/t/1_g028x8hi/28379181$$2URL
000000060 8564_ $$yTweet counts per day$$938f8bf92-6ef4-4774-9722-d14f81efef92$$s308138$$uhttps://socialmediaarchive.org/record/60/files/not-with-a-bang_tweet-counts_2022-03-06.csv
000000060 8564_ $$yTweet ids$$91cb1b209-2635-477b-a930-a3a829c3a0a9$$s6810144$$uhttps://socialmediaarchive.org/record/60/files/not-with-a-bang_tweet-ids_2022-03-01.txt
000000060 905__ $$a2024-10-14
000000060 906__ $$a2007-03-18$$b2022-03-06
000000060 907__ $$a2022-03-01$$b2022-03-06
000000060 908__ $$aTwitter
000000060 910__ $$aapplication programming interface (API)
000000060 912__ $$aFor the tweet ID file (and associated CSV which we cannot share at this time), we used the academic track of the Twitter Search API (via DocNow's twarc) and collected tweets that contained any of the following keywords and combinations: 
<ul> 
<li>"not with a bang"</li>
<li>"but with a whimper"</li>
<li>"but a whimper"</li>   
<li>"this is the way the world ends" and "not with" and "but"</li>   
<li>"this is how the world ends" and "not with" and "but"</li>   
</ul>
This search resulted in 332,306 tweets (including original tweets, retweets, replies, quote tweets, etc.) spanning from March 18, 2007 until March 1, 2022.
<br><br>  
For the tweet counts file, we used the academic track of the Twitter tweet counts API endpoint (via DocNow's twarc), as well as a similar but slightly more liberal set of search terms:
<ul>
<li>not with a bang"</li>  
<li>"but a whimper"</li>  
<li>“but with a whimper”</li>  
<li>"this is the way” and “ends” and “not with”</li>  
<li>“this is how” and “ends” and “not with”</li> 
</ul>
This search resulted in a reported 351,666 total tweets  (including original tweets, retweets, replies, quote tweets, etc.) from March 18, 2007 until March 6, 2022.  
000000060 914__ $$aFor the tweet IDs: unique ID for tweet (which can be used to fetch attributes of a tweet, such as tweet text, retweet count, favorite count, time of tweet). For the tweet counts: number of tweets and retweets that included key words each day.
000000060 923__ $$ahttps://github.com/DocNow/twarc
000000060 924__ $$atwarc is a command line tool and Python library for collecting and archiving Twitter JSON data via the Twitter API
000000060 980__ $$aX
000000060 980__ $$aDatasets
000000060 981__ $$aPublished$$b2024-10-04