TwitAlgoAlgorithm Writes People’s Life Histories Using Twitter

Twitter allows anyone to describe their life in unprecedented detail. Many accounts provide an ongoing commentary of an individual’s interests, activities and opinions.

So it’s not hard to imagine that it’s possible to reconstruct a person’s life history by analysing their Twitter stream.

But doing this automatically is trickier than it sounds. That’s because most Twitter streams contain news of important events mixed up with entirely trivial details about events of little or no significance. The difficulty is in telling these apart.