The news about Emoji Dick (the version of Moby Dick translated into Emoji) being acquired by the Library of Congress prompted me to capriciously go to Twitter Search to see who was talking about it. As I drilled backwards I was surprised to see the search results went back to Fred Benenson’s original Tweet about the project.

https://twitter.com/fredbenenson/status/1195751643

That Tweet is from 4 years ago!

Up until recently you could only search back a couple of weeks, tops. The only sad thing is that the Twitter Search API still seems to have the two week window. I used my little twarc utility to drill back in the search results via the API and the earliest it was able to find for the same query was from 2013-02-18.

Hopefully the search window for the API will be opened up at some point, since it is at least theoretically possible now. If you happen to know any of the details about how the search functionality works I would be most grateful to hear from you.

Oh, and of course, I had to request Emoji Dick from the stacks:

PLEASE DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE.
 
STATUS: Your request has been received.
REQUEST ID: 243106235
SEND TO: Adams Charge Station (LA 5244) - Staff
REQUEST RECEIVED: Mon Feb 25 12:56:19 EST 2013
TITLE: Emoji Dick ; or The Whale / by Herman Melville ; Edited and Compiled by Fred Benenson ; Translation by Amazon Mechanical Turk. 
AUTHOR: Melville, Herman, 1819-1891. 
CALL#: PS2384 .M6 2012

The one-time-cataloger in me thinks that there was a missed opportunity to add a uniform title to the LC catalog record…. But the title statement of responsibility mentioning that it is a translation made by Amazon Turk more than makes up for that!

Thanks Jay for letting me know what is going on at my own place of work.