aaronsw

Aaron Swartz left us all a week ago. It’s strange, I only met Aaron once at the Internet Archive, and had a handful of conversations with him via email/irc … but not a day has passed since last Saturday that I haven’t thought about him, and his principled life.

I’ve been asked a few times why Aaron has been on my mind so much, and I’ve struggled to put it into words. Meanwhile, so many thoughtful things have been written about him. The arc of his life, his ideals, and abilities, charisma, and chutzpah, seem larger than life. And yet, he was just a person, a son, a friend, with people who loved him. It’s just heartbreaking.

I work as a software developer in libraryland, trying to bridge the world of information we’ve had with the world we are building on the Web. So for me, Aaron was a role model, a teacher whose lessons weren’t in textbooks or scholarly journals, but in his blog, in his code, in his talks, in his experiments with real world results. He was only 26 when he died, but he was, and remains, as Tim Berners-Lee paradoxically called him, a “wise elder”.

I wanted to write something here, but more than that I wanted to do something.

I noticed that Internet Archive created a collection devoted to online material related to Aaron, and thought I would try to collect together all the Twitter conversations that mention him. Twitter’s search is limited to the last week, so I quickly wrote a command line utility that pages through search results using their API, and writes out the complete data as line-oriented JSON. I also pulled in the tweets that mention #pdftribute since they were largely inspired by Aaron’s efforts in the open access space. I packaged up the data using BagIt and put it up at Internet Archive. Here’s the description from the bag-info.txt

On January 11, 2013 the Internet activist Aaron Swartz took his own life, and a great deal of grief, anger, and constructive thinking erupted on the Web and in Twitter. In particular the #pdftribute Twitter tag was born, in an attempt to raise awareness about Open Access issues, that Aaron did so much to futher during his life.

This package contains Twitter JSON data for two Twitter search queries that were collected in the week following Aaron’s death:

• “Aaron Swartz” OR aaronsw
• #pdftribute

aaronsw.json.gz contains 630,397 tweets, for the period starting with 2013-01-11 16:50:22 and ending 2013-01-18 13:50:02.

pdftribute.json.gz contains 42,277 tweets, for the period starting with Jan 13 02:42:26 and ending Jan 17 03:33:46.

In addition the URLs mentioned in the tweets found in aaronsw.tar.gz were extracted, unshortened, and then aggregated to provide a report of what people linked to. These URLs are available in aaronsw-urls.txt.gz.

It is hoped that this data will help document the Web community’s response to Aaron’s death, and life.

Below is a list of the top 50 links shared in tweets about Aaron. There were 36,506 in all.

There were 209,839 Twitter users that mentioned Aaron on Twitter in the last week. I was one of them. I wish I could’ve done more to help.