Real Words
Imagined Tweets

How has social media changed political discourse? Let’s flip the question around and look at past political discussions as if they were being shared through Twitter. What changes?

Here you can explore interjections documented in Hansard, the official record of Australia’s parliamentary proceedings, between 1901 and 1980. The words, speakers, and dates are real. The Twitter handles, activity stats, and times are invented.

The data

Over 900,000 interjections were extracted from the Hansard XML repository, which was harvested from the ParlInfo database published on the Parliament of Australian website.

Thanks to @legostormtroopr and the Psephos site for the avatars.

In keeping with Twitter conventions, the interjections displayed here are less than 250 characters long – allowing room for a link to the full debate during which the interjection was uttered.

Tweets are displayed randomly, so every timeline is different. Click on a date to open an individual tweet (with a convenient permalink).

Created by

Tim Sherratt (@wragge)
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