We Love the NHS

The US move to reform health care prompted action on the other side of the ocean. I first learned about it in the middle of August from breaking tweets. It seemed like it would be an interesting addition to the other material on the Obama health care effort. It would also fit into work on the globalization of communication in this new public domain.

The first tweet I captured with Archivist was 8:51 a.m. on August 14, 2009.

There was considerable initial enthusiasm for 'sending a message' as is recounted in the early notes about the stream. It has now, middle of September, slowed to a trickle.

As of September 20 there have been just over 20,000 tweets telling Americans that we are nuts to not understand how good NHS really is.

I decided to continue to collect messages as long as US is debating health care to see if it would revive as the debate got hotter [after August recess].

The search stopped April 4, 2010. At that point there were 22,996 messages.

The figure giving the distribution over time is a bit weird.

Ignore the single entry for 2008; that was a mistake Archivist made. The shape is pretty straightforward -- a single spike and then down to nothing very quickly. But it never stopped; there were always a few comments about the NHS or the crazy Americans.

The data files are welovethenhs.xml and welovethenhs.txt, which is a tab delimited file that can be read with Excel.