Tweet History (Odd Publications)

Is reading tweets different when they are part of a book? Does context change the tone and scope of your ideas? Explore what happens when content that is ephemeral by nature is preserved in printed form. This book is both an archive and an irony; an object that quickly becomes obsolete, given the exponential speed on which online content is generated every day, but also an artefact that is always there to remind you of your brief passage on the overwhelming flood of information.

“A tweet history” is a mechanism for frustrated writers to have a published book with their names on the cover, a way for narcissists to encapsulate their own thoughts in a physical object and a strategy to fill that empty space in your modest library. Shown here is a tweet history for President Donald Trump, but anyone with a tweet history could have their personal tweet history bundled through Odd Publications.

This randomly generated “book contains two months of Donald Trump’s tweets (which comes down to about 450 tweets) and is almost 600 pages thick. All the loaded content is chronologically ordered, but processed with aleatoric combinations, which leads to unexpected and interesting results. It contains tweets, quotes, photos, stats, a hashtag index and a reference index.

Throughout the book we did not want to show the hashtag # and at @ symbols in front of words. We want that the user engages with the content more as if it were literature than a transcription of internet language. Every hashtag and reference is henceforth shown in Italics. When there is a reference, a small @ symbol is shown at the end of a tweet. The hashtag index at the end of the book shows which hashtags were used and the references show whom the user reached out to.

The line that goes through the book is a compound element between retweets and likes, and shows the reach of each tweet in terms of popularity. The higher the line goes, the more reach and popular a tweet is.

Designed by Jaap Smit and coded by Darien Brito

ITC Century (Light Condensed and Italic) is used throughout.