What’s Do Your Pre-NetNarr Twitter Tracks Look Like?
Difficulty: 1 (rated by author; 1=easy <--> 5=difficult)
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Type: Digital Life
We make quite a bit of use of Twitter in #Netnarr (see what I did there, a hashtag). How might our activit change over the course of the course? We can take a “before” snapshot using a twitter account analysis tool.
Whether you enter #NetNarr as a brand new baby tweeter or a rather wizened old bird, we can evaluate and try to read insight into our patterns of use.
To explore this over the time of this course, we are going to take a snapshot of our own twitter presence. Some of you will have extensive tracks already, a few maybe just have their first footprints in the digital sand. We are doing this to create a comparison to do at the end of the course.
One Way to Analyze our Twitter Account
We will use the Twitter Account Analysis tool created by Luca Hammer. When you go to the site, click the Sign in With Twitter button.
This may be a familiar process for you; often we use our accounts with Google, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn to log into other sites. Be doing so we grant permission to the site we want to use, to use certain aspects of our accounts on these host sites. For the most part, these are reasonable. But do you ever stop to think what is happening?
Once you have given permission to this site, you can see an account of your own twitter account. One the first screen you can see data on your activity, when and how much you tweet.

Make a screenshot of your own activity like I did above (if you need help saving a screenshot as an image file on your device, refer to take-a-screenshot.org). Save this file and use it in your blog post.
Scrolling down the page, you will find more data on the ways you access twitter and details on specific activity in twitter:

As an individual, this is rather useful as insight into my activity. You may notice you can look at the activities of any other twitter user. And you may wonder about what all this data means in aggregate.
Save these images and/or write a blog post as your response to this Make. Include some interpretation on what the patterns might tell you. Also, speculate about the implications that while we can use this for our own purposes, what does it mean when we aggregate over thousand or millions of people.
You ought to notice that the Twitter Account Analysis tool allows you to also examine the patterns of any other user– what might you discover by comparing yours to theirs? What can you conclude by reading their analysis?
Example for "What’s Do Your Pre-NetNarr Twitter Tracks Look Like?":
https://accountanalysis.lucahammer.com/cogdog
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