  Twitter is among the commonest sources of data employed in social media
research mainly because of its convenient APIs to collect tweets. However, most
researchers do not have access to the expensive Firehose and Twitter Historical
Archive, and they must rely on data collected with free APIs whose
representativeness has been questioned. In 2010 the Library of Congress
announced an agreement with Twitter to provide researchers access to the whole
Twitter Archive. However, such a task proved to be daunting and, at the moment
of this writing, no researcher has had the opportunity to access such
materials. Still, there have been experiences that proved that smaller
searchable archives are feasible and, therefore, amenable for academics to
build with relatively little resources. In this paper I describe my efforts to
build one of such archives, covering the first three years of Twitter (actually
from March 2006 to July 2009) and containing 1.48 billion tweets. If you
carefully follow my directions you may have your very own little Twitter
Historical Archive and you may forget about paying for historical tweets.
Please note that to achieve that you should be proficient in some programming
language, knowable about Twitter APIs, and have some basic knowledge on
ElasticSearch; moreover, you may very well get disappointed by the quality of
the contents of the final dataset.
