start page #HC09 campaign for health care

Twitter Your Senator -- a campaign initiated by Obama organization

In July the Obama administration began their campaign for health care reform in earnest. They posted a number of videos about health care reform to the White House channel on YouTube. And they started a twitter your senator campaign. They adopted the hashtag #hc09 as the hashtag for the campaign.

The search term is #hc09

I was just getting started with the Archivist software at that point, and I managed to mangle the first days of this search. There are four non-overlapping files:

#hc09-090726 -- first messages on July 20, but these were few; last messages were 7/27 7:59 p.m.
#hc09-090727 -- first message 7/27 at 8:01 p.m.; the last message 10:37 p.m.
#hc09-090729 -- first message 7/28 8:34 p.m.; last message 7/29 11:59 p.m.
#hc09-090730 -- first message 7:29 12:00 a.m.; last message 04/04/2010

It covers most, but not all, of the campaign from its beginnings in late July through April 4, 2010. There is a large surge at the start of the campaign. There were about 8,400 messages the first three days of the campaign. I carried the search on through the final passage of health care reform in March 2010, but the stream was down to only a few messages a day by the end of the campaign. It had been forgotten for other ways of constructing a stream about health care.

I have reconstructed the .txt files so that they do not overlap. The first three .xml files files overlap considerably. So I am only making the .txt files available.

The files are: hc09-090726.txt, hc09-090727.txt, hc09-090729.txt, and hc09-090730.txt. These are tab delimited files that can be read with Excel.