Honduras Curfew

There was a military coup. They tossed the president out. Then September 21, 2009 the duly elected president returned. He was in the Brazilian embassy to keep the coup at bay. The coup government declared a curfew to keep people from celebrating the president's return. And the tweets began.

The initial archivist search only found 295 micro messages. The second on was 4:38 p.m. on September 21, 2009. So 8 hours only produced 30+ tweets per hour. @breakingnews, a twitter news aggregator, seems to have been an important source of the early news.

I will find out if it becomes 'something.'

Five weeks later something interesting happened. The military leader and the ousted president reached a deal returning the ousted leader to office according to The Washington Post. So I did a search again with Archivist; these were the word combinations.

"Honduras" had far and away the most messages. I searched and Archivist produced 1,500 -- the limit. They were all from October 30 -- the day the deal was struck -- l despite my searching at 8:00 a.m. And they seemed to be about the deal, though my Spanish is nonexistent so I cannot be sure. On this basis I decided to continue the search with the broader phrase "Honduras".

The curfew only produced 900 messages. The 'celebration' of the return has already produced more than that almost immediately. Perhaps celebration is less threatening.

The first search for "honduras curfew" ended with 880 messages. The timeline for those messages is

The .txt file that can be read by Excel to acquire the data is: honduras curfew.txt

The search stopped November 1, 2009 with 5723 messages.

The .txt file that can be read by Excel to acquire the data is: honduras-deal.txt