Finally, after 7 years of investigation, the British government has released the Chilcot Report, the UK’s official inquiry into its participation in the Iraq War (coverage at the Guardian, NY Times, and the Intercept). We’ve purchased a copy, and are also in the process of storing a digital copy in the Stanford Digital Repository.
Now there’s word that the 12 volumes and 2.6 million words will be tweeted by the Chilcot Bot 140 characters at a time. I’m not sure how exactly 140 characters every 4.5 minutes is “more digestible,” but it does bring about an interesting thought experiment: how does one collect a document published as a year’s worth of tweets?!
The Chilcot report is long—2.6 million words long. It takes the form of 12 hefty volumes that occupy a table measuring several meters in length, in print form.
Now, you can savor the document, which took 7 years to produce and find that the United Kingdom joined the invasion of Iraq under dubious circumstances, in tweet-sized bursts.
The bot issues a new tweet every 4.5 minutes or so, according to a calculation by Motherboard. It was created by BuzzFeed to reproduce the text in a more “digestible” form, according to Chris Applegate, a U.K.-based developer who worked on it.
via This Bot Will Spend the Next Year Tweeting the Chilcot Report – Nextgov.com.
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