Tweet IDs
For the #metoo Digital Media Collection, Schlesinger Library saved tweets. According to the Twitter Terms of Service, we can only provide public access to the tweet IDs (the numeric code that identifies each unique tweet). In order to obtain the full tweets, a researcher may take a tweet ID and send a request to the live Twitter site through an API and retrieve the tweet, if it has not been deleted.
Rehydration
From our Dataverse, you can download a list of tweet IDs and send them up to Twitter’s live site to retrieve full tweets which you can then analyze. This automated action is called “rehydration”. Tweets can be “rehydrated” using a relatively simple computer program with a graphical user interface. We have tested these datasets with Hydrator, an application developed by Documenting the Now. Some of our lists of tweet IDs are quite large, so it may take you several hours to rehydrate a large set. You may want to start with a small number of tweet IDs. Please see this quick tutorial by one of the creators of Hydrator, Ed Summers. This page from Programming Historian also gives more details on using Hydrator.
More information
If you are interested in collecting tweets yourself, there are many resources online, especially Documenting the Now. You may also be interested in the 1 October Twitter Data Collection Tutorial series from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Library.