From 2006 to early 2022, this collection contains at least 350,000 tweets referencing or remixing the iconic lines from T.S. Eliot's poem 'The Hollow Men'. The dataset was compiled by researcher Melanie Walsh to study the political usage of the phrase, particularly in discussions of democracy and culture wars, as it evolved into a linguistic snowclone.
Use Cases
- Analyze the frequency and political context of tweets referencing the 'not with a bang but a whimper' phrase to track its evolution from literary quotation to common idiom.
- Study the distribution of tweets using the phrase to critique political correctness versus those using it to warn about the state of democracy, as identified by the authors.
- Examine the temporal patterns of at least 350,000 tweets to identify peaks in usage correlated with political or cultural events from 2006 to 2022.
- Investigate the linguistic construction of the phrase as a snowclone by cataloging lexical substitutions and variations within the tweet text.
Strengths
- Contains at least 350,000 tweet observations, providing a substantial corpus for analysis.
- Covers a long temporal span from Twitter's inception in 2006 to early 2022, enabling longitudinal study.
- Focuses on a specific, culturally salient phrase with documented political usages from both left and right spectrums.
Limitations
- The dataset is limited to Twitter (X) and does not capture usage of the phrase on other social media or communication platforms.
- The exact search terms used for collection are not detailed in the provided input, which may affect reproducibility and understanding of scope.
- Analysis is constrained to a single literary reference, limiting generalizability to broader studies of literary circulation online.
Provenance
- Source
- Twitter (now X)
- Collection Method
- Computational analysis of Twitter data using specific search terms for variations of T.S. Eliot's lines.
- Time Range
- 2006 to early 2022
- Freshness
- null
- Geography
- null